Off screen plotter not working, even with off_screen=True

Describe the bug, what’s wrong, and what you expected.

Hi guys, I’m trying to render with an off_screen plotter, but still getting:

AttributeError: 
This plotter has not yet been set up and rendered with ``show()``.
Consider setting ``off_screen=True`` for off screen rendering.

I already created the plotter as: plotter = pv.Plotter(off_screen=True) but I’m still getting the same error.

I also previously run:

sudo apt-get install xvfb
export DISPLAY=:99.0
export PYVISTA_OFF_SCREEN=true
export PYVISTA_USE_IPYVTK=true
Xvfb :99 -screen 0 1024x768x24 > /dev/null 2>&1 &
sleep 3

I’m also setting these environment variables just before the pyvista import in my Python code:

import os
os.environ['PYVISTA_OFF_SCREEN'] = 'true'
os.environ['PYVISTA_USE_IPYVTK'] = 'true'
os.environ['PYVISTA_USE_PANEL'] = 'true'
import pyvista as pv

Note: I don’t have python-qt4 installed since python-qt4 package is not available over Ubuntu 22.04.

Steps to reproduce the bug.

Next is the code that reproduces the error. This code was working on pyvista 0.26 over Ubuntu 16.04, Python 3.5. I just upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04 with pyvista 0.34.2, Python 3.10.

plotter = pv.Plotter(off_screen=True)
plotter.add_mesh(mesh, texture=texture, lighting=False)
# Get render:
render_as_array = plotter.image.copy()  # This is the line that throws the error.

System Information

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Date: Thu Jun 30 17:20:03 2022 -03

                OS : Linux
            CPU(s) : 8
           Machine : x86_64
      Architecture : 64bit
               RAM : 15.5 GiB
       Environment : Jupyter
       File system : ext4
        GPU Vendor : Mesa/X.org
      GPU Renderer : llvmpipe (LLVM 13.0.1, 256 bits)
       GPU Version : 4.5 (Core Profile) Mesa 22.0.1

  Python 3.10.4 (main, Apr  2 2022, 09:04:19) [GCC 11.2.0]

           pyvista : 0.34.2
               vtk : 9.2.0
             numpy : 1.22.4
           imageio : 2.19.3
           appdirs : 1.4.4
            scooby : 0.5.12
        matplotlib : 3.5.2
           IPython : 8.4.0
        ipyvtklink : 0.2.2
             scipy : 1.8.1
              tqdm : 4.64.0
            meshio : 5.3.4
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Screenshots

No response

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[akaszynski]

Ideally image would work, or if it doesn’t, it returns an intelligible error.

We might just consider using screenshot and discouraging image, or at the very least providing better documentation.

[juanilarregui]

It works!

Are there any differences in calling screenshot() over image? (for example, in execution times).

Is this supposed to be a feature (not calling image anymore)? So I know if I need to correct the code from some version number.