[Qgis-developer] Custom raster drawing

[Tim Sutton]

Hi Barry

The long term solution to this is that QgsRaster needs some mjor
refactoring. There is ongoing work on this in the transparency branch
but it does not yet adress your needs. My suggestion is that you join
our effor for getting qgsraster refactored. We have a roadmap for this
here

http://wiki.qgis.org/qgiswiki/RasterTransparencyBranch

which I see you have already had a look at. Other things I would like
to do is move out all data format specific into its own subclasses and
make qgsrasterlayer an abstract base class. Also I would like to
suport custom color ramps and palletes  whose logic is separate to the
core raster drawing code. This means the pseudo color, rgb etc etc
code would come out of raster layer. Instead as each pixel is rendered
the layer value will be looked up from the data source and passed to
our colour mapping class which would return a qcolor which we then
draw onto the canvas. This would provide an extremelyfelxible aproach
and for writing custom colour maps all you need to do is implement a
subclass of QgsColorMap (in python or c++).

Another thing I would like to do fairly urgently is get an ossim data
provider implemented.

There are many other things I would like to do with raster, so I would
like to suggest that we hold an online irc or skype meeting for all
those interested in raster.  The goals of the meeting would be to firm
up a road map for raster with the aim of getting it merged into the
release after 0.9, and to divvy up the work to make this happen.

If you are interested to participate that would be great! I'd also
hope to see Marco and Pete Ersts there and perhaps one of the ossim
folks?

Tentaively Id suggest this friday as a date for the meeting.


Regards

Tim


2007/6/12, Barry Rowlingson <b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk>:
> I want to display some rasters with a very specific colour scheme:
>
>   values from 0 to 0.9: gray (or maybe green. Something neutral)
>   from 0.90 to 0.95 : gray to yellow
>   from 0.95 to 0.99 : yellow to orange
>   from 0.99 to 1.00 : orange to red
>
>   its a sort of 'alert' system, the values are probabilities.
>
> The current raster colouring system won't do it, so I've looked at how I
> can extend it to do so. I've tried a couple of things:
>
>   I wrote a new Python class that extends QgsRasterLayer, and wrote an
> overridden 'draw' method.
>
>   QgsRasterLayer has two draw methods - one with five arguments
> (although in the docs this is called the '4 argument' method) and one
> with three. The five-arg method does some calculation and then calls the
> three-arg method. The drawThumbnail method also calls the three-arg
> method directly. The three-arg method is then a big switch statement on
> the drawing style.
>
>   What I wanted to do was to override the 3-arg method with my new
> drawing code - it just has to paint on a QImage and return. But my
> Python class method got called with 5-args. When I just called the
> parent 5-arg method from my Python method it never called it again with
> 3-args. You can only have one method per name in a Python class, so
> maybe there's some trick with SIP to get this to work. I couldn't. The
> simple solution here would be to rename the 3-arg draw method in the C++
> code, then I could override that and have it called. Let's call this
> solution #1.
>
>   Solution #2 is to have a new drawing style, lets call it
> CUSTOM_DRAWING_STYLE - then the big switch would have another case which
> would then call drawCustomStyle - which would have a null definition for
> a QgsRasterLayer by default, but which could be overridden by other
> classes. I'd override one of the current drawing routines, probably
> drawSingleBandPseudoColor, but they are private and so can't be accessed
> from Python wrappers.
>
>   Solution #3 is to rewrite the raster drawing code to use renderers. I
> think this is outside my timeframe though - I'd like to get this done in
> a matter of weeks.
>
>   On top of all this there are still problems since to draw a raster on
> screen I think you need access to adfGeoTransform, which is declared
> private and there's no accessor method.
>
>   I know I've probably gone on about raster drawing before, but this is
> the last thing on my Todo list for my project. I'm willing to spend time
> on Qgis for this. Solutions #1 and #2 are pretty quick hacks that
> shouldn't take long, #3 would require working with the rest of the team
> to get it right. The problem with the private adfGeoTransform (and
> possible other private members needed from Python) could be solved with
> writing some accessor methods and associated SIP code.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Barry
>
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Tim Sutton
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