GSoC 2021: New GUI widgets in Ignition Gazebo

[atharva-18]

Hello, community,

I am Atharva Pusalkar, a third-year engineering student from Dwarkadas J. Sanghvi College of Engineering, Mumbai, India. I have been making small contributions to the Ignition Gazebo repository for the past few weeks. I came across the project list for this year’s Google Summer of Code and I found the project titled “New GUI widgets in Ignition Gazebo” really interesting. The work involves both GUI and rendering, and I would like to contribute more to the Ignition Gazebo repository through this project

I have been playing with the code of Ignition Rendering and Gazebo, and I came up with a prototype for visualizing an entity as transparent and as a wireframe in OGRE 1. Similar to collisions, these visualizations are also toggled using a service from the GUI side, specifically, from the EntityContextMenu.

This is how it looks like:

Visualize as wireframe

Visualize as transparent

Side menu

I am currently also implementing the visual classes for CoM, Inertia, and Joints. These are toggled in the same way as collisions. The SDF DOM is fetched from the ECM.
Is there a more efficient way to create these visuals?

Thanks!

[chapulina]

These look awesome, @atharva-18 ! Looking forward to the pull requests!

@atharva-18

Is there a more efficient way to create these visuals?

Following the pattern from collision visualization is the right way to go. The visuals should be created the 1st time the user requests them, and then just toggle visibility from then on.