[GRASS-dev] v.delaunay z-values, Google SoC wxnviz

[Michael Barton]

On Feb 20, 2010, at 9:28 AM, grass-dev-request at lists.osgeo.org wrote:

> Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 10:00:59 -0500
> From: Helena Mitasova <hmitaso at unity.ncsu.edu>
> Subject: Re: [GRASS-dev] v.delaunay z-values, Google SoC wxnviz
> To: Hamish <hamish_b at yahoo.com>
> Cc: GRASS developers list <grass-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
> Message-ID: <60B03AB1-ADB8-4303-8CCB-EF719356C449 at unity.ncsu.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> 
> Going back to nviz - Google SoC has been announced, I lost track where it stands now
> but I am wondering whether we should set up 2010 topics wiki and
> give wxnviz some priority, if Martin would be willing to mentor it.
> 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 ).

I agree. The recent wxPython updates I submitted fix a number of minor interface issues, and the current iteration should be working well now. What is needed are:

1) getting this to work with Windows
2) adding some of the NVIZ functionality (e.g., save to graphic file, legend, scale/north arrow (clunky in NVIZ), lighting adjustments, cutting planes, etc).

Martin has laid a pretty strong foundation to do this if and if a SOC project could be done to take this to the next stage it would be great. I agree that Martin is the best choice of mentor. I know the interface pretty well, but he knows the very important C++ code that makes this work.

> 
> Another tool that needs replacement in wxGUI is xganim,
> it is easy enough to generate animations using scripts but to quickly preview what you actually have
> in the series, browse through it, identify problems or just quickly show it,
> xganim has been unbeatable so far. So it may be a good topic for Google SoC
> but I am not sure we have a mentor for it (I don't know enough about wxpython to be helpful here)

This is a nice SOC project. With some help from Glynn, I did a TclTk rewrite of xganim a few years ago. It should be quite doable via wxPython and I might be able to mentor it.

Another interface project would be to create a wxPython replacement for i.classify. We've got all the tools to do it (e.g., using v.edit to create training fields)

Michael