Visualizer

Creating a Visualizer

The Visualizer is managing the rendering of visual objects. It uses Actors to create and update objects instances. The visual data is received from a Database, thus it requires one to connect to. The Database must obviously be the same for the Factory and the Visualizer. There are several ways to create them, you can choose the more convenient regarding your applications:

from SSD.Core import UserAPI, Visualizer

# OPTION 1: Create a new Factory and launch the Visualizer from this Factory
factory = UserAPI(database_dir='my_directory',
                  database_name='my_database',
                  remove_existing=True)
factory.add_mesh(...)
factory.launch_visualizer(backend='vedo')

# OPTION 2: Create a new Factory and connect to a Visualizer manually
factory = UserAPI(database_dir='my_directory',
                  database_name='my_database',
                  remove_existing=True)
factory.add_mesh(...)
Visualizer.launch(database_dir='my_directory',
                  database_name='my_database',
                  backend='vedo')
factory.connect_visualizer()

Warning

The Visualizer must be initialized once all the object are added to the Factory.

Note

Several Factories can be connected to a single Visualizer. To do so, you must choose the option 2 with each call to factory.connect_visualizer done in a separate thread.

In both cases, several options are available when launching the Visualizer:

Field	Type	Description
`backend`	str	The name of the Visualizer to use (either `vedo` or `open3d`).
`offscreen`	bool	If True, the visualization will be done offscreen.
`fps`	int	Maximum frame rate.

Updating a Visualizer

The Visualizer updates the rendering view when a call to render is triggered in the Factory. Between two calls of the ``render`` method, visual object data can be updated several times per object. If an object was not updated during the step, an empty line is added to the corresponding *Table in the Database to keep the same number of rows in all Tables.

factory.update_mesh(...)
factory.update_points(...)
factory.render()

Warning

Do not forget to close the Visualizer at the end of of your simulation:

factor.close()

Replay Visualizer

Once a Database with visual data is recorded, it is possible to replay it using the ReplayVisualizer. It will read a row of all Tables at each time step (this is one of the reasons why we want to keep the Tables synchronized with ont row per step). The ReplayVisualizer only requires to be initialized to be launched:

from SSD.Core import Replay

# Launch the ReplayVisualizer
Replay(database_dir='my_directory',
       database_name='my_database',
       backend='open3d').launch()

Note

It is totally possible to use the open3D backend with a Database previously used with vedo and vice-versa.