Let's begin exploring ParaView's panels by adding some data to the visualization pipeline. In addition to importing data from external file sources, users can include data from numerous predefined parametric sources. These sources provide simple shapes that can be used to enhance the presentation of data.

To keep this example simple, we will use the predefined cylinder source. All sources are created using items found under the Sources menu. Select Sources→Geometric Shapes→Cylinder and a Cylinder node now appears in the tree view of the Pipeline Browser panel. Next to the node is an "eye" icon (1) that controls its visibility. The cylinder is initially invisible, so click the icon to make it visible in the active Render View. The cylinder now appears in the "RenderView1" render view (2) in the "Layout #1" tab (3) of the Render Views panel on the right.

When additional sources are added, they will appear in the pipeline browser as children of the top node. The browser's top node displays the name of the server to which ParaView is connected. In this example, the server is the one that is "built in" to the stand-alone application. In later sections we will add filters to source nodes, and they will be positioned as child nodes of those source nodes in the browser tree. Every node that can contribute to the rendered image will have its own visibility toggle.