geomview comments

[bill at robots.ox.ac.uk]

Many thanks for geomview!! 

I only found out about it a few days ago, but I'd been looking for
something to provide a new user interface for a small geometric
modeller/robot simulation package we have here. Geomview was very easy
to interface to our software, so we now have a really great new
visualisation package for almost no effort.

A few questions:

1) I only found out about geomview by word of mouth. Which newsgroups or
mailing lists should I follow for announcements of new versions,
add-ons, etc? (This could go in the docs!)

2) Do you know if there's an interface to Mathematica in the works
anywhere? (I have seen an X interface to Mathematica with `live'
rotation & scaling somewhere, so it should be possible).

3) For geometric models with a definite `up' axis, the current
mouse-transform interface is rather inconvenient as you keep tilting the
model from the vertical. It would be nice if the rotations could be
constrained to keep the model-vertical aligned with the display-vertical
(model y-axis in display y-z plane, I presume). Is this possible or
easy-to-implement?

4) Below is a small shell-script which invokes geomview and maybe pipes
objects from stdin into it. Quite useful for starting geomview from
other programs.

Thanks again.

Bill Triggs                       | bill at robots.oxford.ac.uk
Oxford University Robotics Group  | tel +44-865-273157
19 Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3PJ, G.B. | fax +44-865-273908

---------
#!/bin/sh
# Script to run geomview-1.2 from the command-line or a program.
#
# We add a "-stdin" flag to pipe an object file on stdin into
# geomview, using geomview -M. (Cf the supplied geomstuff
# & animate scripts). Otherwise just run geomview as usual.
#
GEOM=/usr/local/lib/geomview
GEOMDATA=$GEOM/data
GEOMBIN=$GEOM/bin/sgi
TMPDIR=/tmp/geomview
export GEOMDATA GEOMBIN
objname=all			# name for piped object

cleanup()
{
  if [ -p "$pipe" ]; then
    /bin/rm -f "$pipe"
  fi
}

for a in "$@"; do
  if [ "$namenext" ]; then
    objname="$a"	
    namenext=
  else
    case "$a" in
    -M) 
	namenext=true;;
    -M*)
	objname="`expr "$a" : "-M\(.*\)"`";;
    -stdin)
	stdin=true;;
    *)	
        args="$args \"$a\"";;
    esac
  fi
done

if [ "$stdin" ]; then
  trap cleanup 0 1 2 3 15

  pipe="$TMPDIR/$objname"
  if [ ! -d "$TMPDIR" ]; then
    mkdir "$TMPDIR"
    chmod a+w "$TMPDIR"
  fi
  if [ ! -p $pipe ] ; then
    /bin/rm -f "$pipe"
    /etc/mknod "$pipe" p
  fi

  eval "$GEOMBIN/geomview -M \"$objname\" $args" &
  cat > "$pipe"
else
  exec $GEOMBIN/geomview "$@"
fi

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