[GRASS-dev] Replacement of NVIZ

[Sören Gebbert]

Syd,

Syd Visser schrieb:
> Soren
> 
> Paraview3 uses Qt and MayaVi2 uses Wxpython thus we are leaning more 
> towards MayaVi2  although we use Paraview2.6 extensively but strictly as 
> a viewer.
> We find MayaVi2 is also more open to user development thus easier to 
> extend.

I'm developing with VTK and Qt since several years and have used ParaView1-2 for several years.
My experience with MayaVi is little, because the user interface was too horrible.
IMHO ParaView3 is the better choice. It has a sophisticated but very
intuitive user interface and is developed by well known institutes and kitware.
And they are doing a great job. ParaView is designed to visualize huge datasets in parallel.

MayaVi2 depends on Traits, TVTK, Envisage and wxPython. A lot of new dependencies (except wxPython).
And for now i'm not able to get even the new grass wxPython gui to run on my debian etch system
because of the dependencies.
ParaView3 depends only on Qt4.2. Qt is available for many, many platforms as well as VTK.
(i still don't understand why wxWidgets and python was choosen for the new grass gui and not Qt
and python ...)

The only thing we need to provide is a data server and gui plugin for ParaView3:
http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Plugin_HowTo
And when ParaView3 reaches a stable state and i have some spare time i'm
absolutely willingly to implement them!

IMHO the data server and the reader/writer to the grass database
(grass data should be modified with Paraview3 and stored back into the grass database :) if possible)
should be implemented in C++ for performance reasons. I would not use the grass python wrapper
to get the data into a visualization system. The grass raster, voxel and vector functions can be
accessed from C++ code directly.

The data server should provide access to the grass database to read and write raster, volume and vector data.
And ParaView3 should be extended with a nice little Qt gui to access the grass data directly from the toolbar
(like Qgis). We don't need to touch the ParaView3 sources, we only need to implement plugins.

A screenshot of ParaView3 handling grass raster, volume and vector data (exported with the *.out.vtk modules)
is available here:
http://www-pool.math.tu-berlin.de/~soeren/grass/modules/screenshots/ParaView3_Screenshot_grass_data.png

Just my two cents ...

sorry for my English
Best regards
Soeren

> 
> Thanks
> Syd
> 
> Sören Gebbert wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Syd Visser schrieb:
>>> We use enthought open source tool suite http://www.enthought.com/ 
>>> which contains Numpy, SciPi and numerous other packages.
>>> our main use is with Matplotlib and Chaco for 2D graphs and MayaVi2 
>>> for 3D graphics
>>> I think these packages would be well worth having a close look at 
>>> especially MayaVi2 (Python wrapped VTK) for the 3D graphics.
>>
>> I would like to prefer a C++ grass data server + grass gui plugin for 
>> paraview3
>> to visualize 3d data. This would a nice and fast solution.
>>
>> Best regards
>> Soeren
>>
>>>
>>> thanks
>>> Syd
>>>
>>
>>
>