PVAGuide
The user manual for PVA: how the graph evaluates, how sessions, groups and templates fit together, and what each pane and window does.
1AU View
The PVA window: canvas and viewport above, dockable panes below, and the menus.
2The Canvas
How to add, connect, copy, arrange and annotate nodes, and how undo works.
3The Plotter
The Plotter node: its scene and events ports, XYZ and RTP frames, the main Plotter and the settings of its viewport.
4Nodes
What a node is, how its card reports state, how the graph evaluates on demand in the background, and how caching and display frames work.
5Groups
Groups collect nodes into named, nestable, collapsible building blocks that you can save as group templates and reuse across sessions.
6Templates
Templates are complete pipelines saved as sessions; New from Template starts a fresh session from one.
7Sessions
A session is the saved recipe of a whole PVA workspace: its file format, sidecars, unsaved-changes rule, launch handling and version gate.
8Parameter Pane
The generic form for editing the selected node: editors by kind, provenance captions, parameter and optional ports and inline errors.
9Camera Pane
How the Camera pane edits a Plotter's camera in observer coordinates and keeps a shared list of named views.
10Canvas Pane
The controls for the canvas: the toolbar, exact position, port sides, zoom, link style, grid, Auto Evaluate and the Actions menu.
11Metrics Pane
Live memory and evaluation figures for the session, and a description of the selected node's payload, files and drawing.
12Terminal Pane
The application log: severity-colored lines, unread badges, the Clear button and the slow-computation warning.
13Viewports
Extra Plotters as viewport tabs, the letterbox, and the mouse and key bindings of a 3-D viewport.
14Interactivity
How clicks and camera moves in a viewport become graph data through the events output and holder nodes.
15Plot Node
What a Plot evaluates to, how the input picks the drawing call, and every option: forms, axis, coloring, colormaps, opacity, lines, points, spheres, tubes and volumes.
16Exporting
How PVA saves a viewport as a PNG or a standalone web page, writes data with the Exporter nodes, and exports a scene from the command line.
17Animations
How PVA renders animations, parameter sweeps over a session, to a movie or a frame folder.
18Settings
How the Settings window stages, validates and saves user preferences across its four pages.
19Shortcuts
The fixed key bindings and mouse gestures of the window, canvas and 3-D viewport.
20Macros
How keys and scroll-wheel gestures are bound to parameter actions that you fire from the 3-D viewport.
21Headless Rendering
How a saved session is rendered to a PNG, a movie or a glTF scene from the command line, with a stable progress protocol.
22Files and Folders
PVA keeps its per-user data in one folder, the PVA home, whose location depends on the platform and can be overridden with PVA_HOME.