Rendering data

Once you’ve downloaded some neuronal morphological reconstructions from your dataset of choice, you can use morphapi to create 3d meshes which you can use to visualize your data (e.g. in brainrender).

The functions to load neurons from the various APIs return instances of morphapi’s Neuron class which can be used to create meshes for your neurons morphologies:

neuron.create_mesh()

This will return two items:

• A vedo actor with the entire neuron’s morphology

• A dict of vedo actors. One for soma, one for the axons and one for the dendrites. This can be useful when these different parts are to be colored differently or if not, the entire neuron is to be visualized.

By default Neuron caches the results of create_mesh to speed up subsequent visualizations of the same neuron. You can override this behaviour in with create_mesh(use_cache=False) but keep in mind that this is done automatically when rendering parameters are changed (e.g. if soma_radius is changed).