1. Quickstart

To use plantgl, you must launch ipython with the following option

terminal_linux:~$ ipython --gui=qt

Warning

If you do not use this option, you will certainly have problems if you want to display your results with the viewer.

To import all the modules from plantgl

from openalea.plantgl.all import *

1.1. Scene creation

The different primitives of PlantGL are assembled into a scene graph object. To create such object:

scene = Scene()

1.2. Create a shape

Some primitives can be instanciated with given material information. As an example , a red Cylinder can be created using the following code:

c = Cylinder(1, 10)
color = Material(Color3(255,0,0),0,Color3(0,0,0),Color3(0,0,0),1,0)
shape = Shape(c, color)

See also

tutorial.rst

1.3. Visualize the scene

The colored shape can be added to the scene and visualize via the Viewer:

scene.add(shape)
Viewer.display(scene)

1.4. Output

Finally, it is possible to save the current view in a PNG file. First, the background color and grids can be set using the following commands:

Viewer.frameGL.setBgColor(255,255,200)
Viewer.grids.setXYPlane(True)
Viewer.grids.setYZPlane(False)
Viewer.grids.setXZPlane(False)
Viewer.frameGL.saveImage("user/result.png")

1.5. Applying Algorithms

A number of algorithms are defined and can be applied to the geometric representation that have been created. For instance, to compute the boundingbox of the scene

bbc = BBoxComputer()
scene.apply(bbc)
boundingbox = bbc.result

Numerous algorithms have been implemented as Action that adapt to the specific structure of each scene graph.

1.6. Turtle Geometry

To assemble iterativelly and easily different shapes, the turtle geometry have been introduced in PlantGL. To use it, a turtle object has to be created that will register the different drawing actions to produce a final representation. For instance to produce a torus

turtle = PglTurtle()
for i in range(12):
     turtle.left(30).F(1)
scene = turtle.getScene()
Viewer.display(scene)