[GRASS-user] Control of camera position in NVIZ

[Patrick Proffitt]

Using NVIZ, I have been able to visualize a segment of roadway my research
group scanned with LiDAR.  The visualization is perfect for what we are
looking for, but there are two things we'd like to do next that I am having
difficulty with.

1) We'd like to make an animation of the roadway from a drivers POV.  Using
the visualization utilities in NVIZ I have been able to manually adjust the
viewing perspective of the visualization to a point that looks good, as in
it looks like what the driver would see if they were in a vehicle and the
vehicle was on the edge of the visualized surface (or very close to it).
However is there anyway to advance the camera forward, again as if on a
vehicle, as if it's driving ON the roadway?  From what I can tell, the
'camera', or POV for viewing the visualized surface, can be anywhere on a
radius away from the surface, however I cannot make the camera advance to
hover over part of the visualized surface.  I can get a good POV shot for a
vehicle about to get started on the roadway, but not for driving across
it.  I'd like to make an animation with frame 1 being what I have now, but
frame 2 etc being that exact same orientation, but with the camera having
'advanced' down the roadway.  I cannot seem to make frames 2 onwards.

2)  In the future we'd like to collect camera images of the driver's POV
looking out the front windshield, so that we'd have an image from the
orientation we'd like to see.  Right now I am adjusting the angles until it
'looks good' - is there anyway to use this out-the-windshield image to
EXACTLY align the visualization into that orientation so that  the image
and the visualization are identically aligned?  I am also aware of the
orthophoto utilities in GRASS, however without these images I have been
unable to play with that.  Will orthophoto do this?

I recently found POV-Ray which I will be playing with shortly, but I'm
curious as to if anyone else has had these same needs and if so how you
worked with it.

Thanks!

Patrick
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/attachments/20120228/57eed841/attachment.html