On render - Drawing smooth line plots - best technique

[pjsmith]

Hi,

I want to replace the standard plot in the EMA with an onRender plot. This is due to the negative effects I have found with assigning colours to each bar of that plot, for slope, etc. I can avoid this if I use onrender.

My query is, do you have any examples of how you would plot something like an EMA line plot, using onrender? The reason I ask. I made a series and drew my plot with line to line (one value to next). It works fine. My only niggle with is, is that the plot looks a bit staircase (rough), whereas the default ema plot is nice and smooth in comparison. Given it is the same underlying data, I was wondering why this might be. Do the NT team (or anyone else) have any suggestions for producing a nice, smooth line plot from a series containing something like an ema set of data? Any example code would be appreciated. I checked around, but for most simple things like this, I could not find anything using onRender.

I'm being really finicky here, as what I have works - It's just not as pleasing to the eye!

Thanks.

[NinjaTrader_Jim]

Hello pjsmith,

Thanks for your question.

I do not have a specific example to share, but I can offer my insights.

Note that the EMA will have plot values associated with each bar and each plot value is connected by a segment line. If you zoom in on the EMA, we can see that each line is connected to the plot value for the bar, and then to the plot value of the next bar. There is not any actual smoothing going on, but the fact that the line is a moving average, the visual output is somewhat smooth.

If you would like to add additional smoothing than what would be seen when connecting each plot value, you could consider adding a point between each plot where the line should go before it connects to the next plot. I have taken an approach like this with my conversion of the Ichimoku Cloud indicator where an additional point is added where the moving average lines crossover. (This gives a definite point where the lines cross over so each cloud has a sharp point.) I have linked this indicator for your reference. It uses RenderTarget.FillGeometry, not RenderTarget.DrawLine, so the line drawing would not be as applicable as the concept of drawing the line between bars.

I would recommend sticking with RenderTarget.DrawLine if you would like to be able to colorize segments of the plot line separately.

IchimokuCloud - https://ninjatraderecosystem.com/use...indicator-nt8/

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I look forward to assisting.