[GRASS-dev] Holiday updates to NVIZ

[Helena Mitasova]

Michael,

I haven't yet chance to try it but the screen shots look very nice,  
much cleaner layout
and hopefully more intuitive. I have a question - during the workshop  
in Lausanne I had
a chance to watch people using nviz and one thing that people  
struggled with was figuring out that
the list of available/loaded surfaces or vector files is under  
Current - there is just plain text with no
indication that when you click on it a list of files will show up. Is  
there any way to make this more intuitive?
It was also interesting to see how quickly people got working with  
paraview - apparently their GUI design
is pretty good.

As for the z-coord. slider for cutting planes - have your tried it  
for tilted cutting plane? It should move it
in z-direction (you won't see anything happening if your cutting  
plane is vertical). I am not sure
whether it actually works but that was the intention.

Thanks a lot for all the great GUIs,

Helena

On Nov 28, 2006, at 12:33 AM, Michael Barton wrote:

> Over the last several days, I was able to continue with the NVIZ  
> GUI update. I also managed to fix a few bugs and hope they stay  
> fixed. Here are the highlights...
>
> I think I’ve fixed a bug causing problems with NVIZ in latlon  
> regions when displaying vector points. At least the points are  
> correctly displayed on my system and NVIZ doesn’t crash. There is  
> still the problem with the height and z-exag
> sliders for the surfaces not working properly (at least in some  
> contexts), but you can at least still  set a reasonable value  
> manually (by typing into the entries next to the sliders). This may  
> be a C-code issue beyond my control.
>
> I also got the auto draw toggle checkbox to actually work in most  
> panels. When it’s checked, making a change (adding a label or  
> changing a display parameter) will cause the display to be re- 
> rendered and the new feature shown. When it’s not checked, you must  
> press the draw button to re-render the display. This still needs  
> some work in the volumes panel, but it’s working pretty well in the  
> rest of the panels now.
>
> I fixed a bug in the sliders. Previously, they only interacted with  
> the associated value entry widgets  correctly if they worked  
> backwards (increase from right to left). Now they work correctly  
> when they increase from left to right.
>
> I completed updating the GUI for all panels except the animations  
> ones. They are next. I've gotten rid of several functions that  
> don't work. If someone wants to resurrect them later, the code is  
> archived of course.
>
> I took out the scale panel. It had no functionality at all. It was  
> just a set of widgets that didn't do anything. In the docs it is  
> listed as not implemented. I separated the north arrow and fringe  
> functions into separate panels that can be called from the new  
> appearance menu. Bob added new code to make fringe elevation and  
> color selections functional. It would be nice to be able to select  
> the color of the arrow and north “N”. These change in different  
> context, but I don’t know how or why since there are no related  
> commands in the TclTk code.
>
> Probably some derivative of the arrow code could be used to make a  
> true scale bar, since the arrow function takes a size  value in map  
> units.
>
> I separated the labels and legend panels, and added a Tk font  
> selection dialog to each. Now you can use any font recognized by  
> TclTk (though some styles like italic or underline don’t work with  
> all font families). Each panel is called from the appearance menu.
>
> I removed the ‘label sites’ panel. In the docs it is listed as not  
> implemented. It has some related code, but it is not functional.  
> Looking at the code, it seems to apply to the old sites format. I  
> don't know what it would take to make it work with current vector  
> formats.
>
> I took out a few non-functional widgets: the clear screen  
> checkbutton on the main panel and the lower entry in the fringe  
> panel. Neither of these had any functional commands attached. I  
> kept in the z-coord slider for the cutting planes. It doesn't seem  
> to do anything, but it has code attached. Maybe someone else could  
> look at it. I’m not sure what it is supposed to do, so am not sure  
> what is needed to fix it.
>
> I’ve put some screenshots of each redesigned NVIZ panel, with  
> example visual display on my website at
> <http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton/files/nviz_screenshots/>.  
> Maybe someone can use these to update the NVIZ help.
>
> Michael
>
> __________________________________________
> Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
> School of Human Evolution & Social Change
> Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
> Arizona State University
>
> phone: 480-965-6213
> fax: 480-965-7671
> www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton
>
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