How to remove or replace the PyVista window icon?

Question

How can I remove or change the PyVista render window's icon? I have tried to search the issue also from the docs but didn't find any answers.

Answer 1

This is not currently supported directly in PyVista, but this is a great idea and I'll open a pull request to implement this once a major refactor of render windows is done .

In the meantime you can use raw VTK , the SetIcon() method on render windows. According to the docs this only works on Windows and Linux though.

As of PyVista 0.36.1 you have direct access to plotter.ren_win which is a VTK render window object. According to the docs the icon should be a vtkImageData ; in practical PyVista terms this means UniformGrid s with dimensions (n, m, 1) .

Some experimentation suggests that the icon has to have uint8 active scalars of shape (n_points, 3) or (n_points, 4) , but I could only get the icon to actually show up on my linux machine with the latter setup. It seems that non-square shaped icons get tiled to square shape, so you have to crop your image to square shape first. Finally, you need to call ren_win.Render() before setting the icon, otherwise problems arise (on my linux machine: a segmentation fault).

Here's a small example:

import numpy as np
import pyvista as pv
from pyvista import examples

# example icon: cropped puppy mesh turned from RGB to RGBA
icon = examples.download_puppy().extract_subset([0, 1199, 0, 1199, 0, 0])
data = np.empty((icon.n_points, 4), dtype=np.uint8)
data[:, :-1] = icon.point_data['JPEGImage']
data[:, -1] = 255  # pad with full opacity
icon.point_data['JPEGImage'] = data

# create a plotter with a dummy mesh and set its icon
plotter = pv.Plotter()
plotter.add_mesh(pv.Dodecahedron())
ren_win = plotter.ren_win  # render window
ren_win.Render()  # important against segfault
ren_win.SetIcon(icon)
plotter.show()

With this my bottom panel looks like this:

It also works for my window switcher:

(Interestingly, the window title in the title bar is "PyVista" which is the default title in pyvista.Plotter.__init__() , but in the window switcher I see "Vtk". I don't know why this is but I'll also try to see if we can fix this.)

Opacity handling seems to work too:

# add opacity in a nontrivial pattern
i, j = np.indices(icon.dimensions[:-1])
alpha = ((np.sin(2*i/icon.dimensions[0]*2*np.pi) * np.cos(j/icon.dimensions[1]*2*np.pi)) * 255).round().astype(np.uint8)
icon.point_data['JPEGImage'][:, -1] = alpha.ravel()

with this icon the window switcher looks like this:

It looks funky but that's just because the opacity pattern itself is funky. Transparency shows up as the switcher's semitransparent background colour on my system.