[GRASS-dev] nviz

[Helena Mitasova]

> We (me and a group of students here) can certainly help to
>> test, develop manual/help pages
>> and maybe even do some programming to help get it moving to
>> replace nviz 
>> which has many things broken or working only partially
>> (points with attributes, file sequencing tool,
>> isosurfaces, etc ). 
> 
> what's the file sequencing tool do? is it like xganim in 3D but
> simpler than the keyframe animator(s)?

it is for making complex animations with dynamic surfaces - some animations
here were done with it (the rest was done with old SG3d)
http://courses.ncsu.edu/mea582/common/media/03/dynamicgis/dynamicgis.html
I actually found a more complete tutorial for nviz buried on my web site
that describes it in detail (it was somewhat difficult to use without the tutorial)
http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/gmslab/viz/nviz_tut.html
it is described in the last section before Hints.

When the GUI for nviz was redesigned, it broke. It looked like it was generating
wrong path to the raster maps, but even after I fixed the path in script manually
it would not run so the problem may be more complex. 
We are now trying to use nviz_cmd for the same purpose, it may be a better solution
if more options are added so I would not spend time on reviving the file
sequencing tool unless it is something trivial.

What bothers me the most are the broken sites with attributes - they worked well and
were fun to use. There is a bug report on it and I think Martis tried to fix it but there were some
problems. It looks like a rescaling issue.

The crashing of isosurfaces appears to be random and hard to reproduce,
but I will be working with them in next few weeks so I should learn more.

> 
> (I wonder how hard it would be to quick-fix those things in the tcl?
> It seems like a series of small bugfixes to me, just requires time and
> tcl smarts to be thrown at it. and the discipline not to extend it :)

fixing the sites for the release would be really great, the rest has not been used much 
so it could wait,

Helena
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> Hamish
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