Graphical Views, and things.

[Leon Pennington]

On Friday 04 June 2004 19:36, CARVALHO Luis Passos wrote:

> The dependency is, in my opinion, a bad thing if you can implement the
> code easily in KPovModeler. If not, then I don't think you should worry
> that much
> about the extra dependency. We'll have to add a check for it in
> autoconf, though.

Part of the reason I was trying to do without was I don't want people having 
dependancy hell. Its not a common lib. The new version is the GTS lib at 
http://gts.sourceforge.net/, and it does a lot more than what we want as 
well.


> Drooool. I hope you manage to achieve this. Won't it be painfully slow
> though?

Actually its quite quick, the functions are no where near as complicated as 
the macros. Also the resolution for objects can be very low, even 65x65 
( 4225 samples ) gives good results for the landscapes.

> We could have a special pattern preview just like we have a texture
> preview. Press the button and a special scene is generated to render the
> pattern.

That sounds good.

> This may not be a good idea. It would be slow, plus how would you find
> the right camera position to match the scale of the preview? I think it
> would be better to allow rendering on top of a view instead of the
> render view manager. That way we would generate an image that is
> 160x100, maybe 200x100. Less pixels -> less time.
>
> Or we could do what povray does with quick_color. Just define a color
> for a texture and use it when painting the faces of the object. That
> would work as a preview, Helping to distinguish the objects. For the
> scene compositing it should be enough, don't you think?


What i was thinking of was mainly eye-candy. your idea sounds a lot better. 

> Anyway, great news. It's always nice to hear what our co-developers have
> been doing.
>
> This reminds me, I don't know if you've been checking on the cvs, but
> the dcop interface already allows us to do some fun stuff. You can
> already change most properties through dcop methods except:
> 	changing object links doesn't work right now
> 	In lists of values like pattern types, you'll have to know the
> property integer values instead of names, which might be a pain, but I'm
> working on it.
>
> Developing a program to move several objects one unit to the right is
> possible already. I'll provide a few example scripts in the weeks to
> come. In the object library front, it is missing search, and handling
> external files, as for the rest, it's pretty much done and for the most
> part stable. (at last!). Usability wise, I'd like to have your input if
> you can spare the time.
>
> Library creation is done in the Kpovmodeler Settings Dialog.
> Object creation is done in the following steps:
> 	Open the library view
> 	Create a new object
> 	Change it's name, description and keywords
> 	Drag the objects into the scene file below
> 	Drag a picture over the "set preview" of the object.
>
> Regards,
> Luis

I'll play with the libs section as soon as I recompile KPM. My local copy is 
very broken at the moment :)

-- 
Leon Pennington

"If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you 
teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime."