Making a surface viewable with Connectome Workbench

Has anyone had any luck generating their own surfaces that can be viewed with connectome workbench? I generally enjoy the renderings and formatting provided by Connectome Workbench over other viewers.

I have Macaque surfaces produced by AFNI’s @animal_warper with the NMT v2 template, which so far has been an excellent tool to use. However, I would prefer to visualize the surfaces using Connectome Workbench. I’ve tried resampling NMT surface files (~41k vertices/hemipshere) to 32k vertices/hemisphere like so:

First, create left and right spheres matching the number of vertices in the NMT surfaces:

wb_command -surface-create-sphere 40962 L.sphere.NMTv2.surf.gii.
wb_command -surface-flip-lr  L.sphere.NMTv2.surf.gii  R.sphere.NMTv2.surf.gii
wb_command -set-structure  L.sphere.NMTv2.surf.gii CORTEX_LEFT
wb_command -set-structure R.sphere.NMTv2.surf.gii CORTEX_RIGHT

Next, but do the same for 32492 vertices so that it can be viewed in Connectome Workbench:

wb_command -surface-create-sphere 32492 L.sphere.32k.surf.gii.
wb_command -surface-flip-lr  L.sphere.32k.surf.gii  R.sphere.32k.surf.gii
wb_command -set-structure  L.sphere.32k.surf.gii CORTEX_LEFT
wb_command -set-structure R.sphere.32k.surf.gii CORTEX_RIGHT

Then, downsample the NMT mid surface with the spheres

!wb_command -surface-resample \
    lh.mid_surface.surf.gii \        #NMT surface at 41k
    L.sphere.NMTv2.surf.gii \
    L.sphere.32k.surf.gii \
    BARYCENTRIC \
    lh.mid_surface.32k.surf.gii      #NMT surface at 32k

The results are really poor:

Screenshot from 2021-03-02 17-18-15

I can’t seem to find any information as to how to create Connectome Workbench compatible surfaces from AFNI. I also don’t know if this is a totally impossible/silly pursuit to begin with!

Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks!

Hi, did you solve this problem? I also have the same question.

While I’m no expert on Workbench, I was able to view these kinds of surfaces by copying the surface datasets to new files that end with “.surf.gii” instead of just “.gii”. For some of these, wb_view only seems to be able to display by loading as “Other” type and setting the Display option to “Surface” (default is Montage).