Extracting Non‐Planar Views from Spheres and Cylinders

Two non-planar views — Sinusoidal and Equirectangular — are available for projecting the surface of a sphere to a flat image (see Spherical Projections), while cylindrical projections represent meridians as straight, evenly-spaced vertical lines and circles of latitude (parallels) as straight horizontal lines (see Cylindrical Projections).

You can use the Brush and Point & Click ROI Painter tools in Multi-slice mode to label pixels in non-planar views (see Painting with the Brush Tools and Painting with the Point & Click Tools). You should note that in this case, the painting sphere or cube will be aligned in the world coordinate system.
How to Extract a Non-Planar 2D View from a Sphere or Cylinder
  1. Add a Sphere or Cylinder shape to the workspace (see Adding and Editing Shapes).

    Note In most cases, it is best to work in a workspace that includes both 2D reformatted views and a 3D view.

  2. Adjust the shape with the anchors so that the shape follows the surface that you want to inspect.
  3. Select a view in the workspace.
  4. With the shape selected in Data Properties and Settings panel, choose Non‐planar 2D view in the View mode drop-down menu in the Scene’s Views Properties panel, as shown below.

    The non-planar view extracted from the surface of the sphere or cylinder appears.

  5. Examine the non-planar view. You should note that additional interactive text annotations, circled below, are available for manipulating non-planar views extracted from spheres and cylinders.

    Theta… Lets you rotate the view around Theta (North Pole position).
    Phi*… Lets you rotate the view around Phi (Equator position).
    Radius… Lets you adjust the radius of the sphere or cylinder.
    Projection*… Lets you toggle the view from Equirectangular to Sinusoidal and vice versa.

    * For Spherical projections only.

  6. Extract a projection of the non-planar view, if required (see Extracting Projections from Non‐Planar Views)