Package Summary

Contains the ROS Visualization Engine (RVE), which is a set of libraries useful for developing 3D visualization tools.

Author: Josh Faust
License: BSD,Creative Commons
Source: hg https://kforge.ros.org/visengine/hg (branch: default)

Development on this stack is discontinued.

Documentation

The visualization_engine stack (also known as RVE) is a framework for developing 3D visualization tools. The goal of RVE is to provide enough functionality to build rviz2 as a GUI on top of it.

While the overall goal of the stack is 3D visualization, there are also a number of underlying technologies that have been developed that may be useful on their own. These packages are currently prefixed by rve_, but if they're proven useful may get promoted upwards.

The packages in RVE can be thought of as belonging to 4 different categories. There are infrastructure packages, which may be useful outside of RVE. Second, there are message/interface packages, which provide messages that are specific to RVE. Third, there are rendering packages, which handle the various aspects of 3D rendering. Last, there are meta-visualization packages, which provide higher-level functionality on top of the infrastructure and rendering packages.

Infrastructure

These packages may be useful outside of RVE, and may be promoted to a higher level at some point. They're being released under the RVE name in order to prove their use and evolve their APIs under real-world use. They also tend to make assumptions about how they're being used that will need to be fixed before they can be promoted out of RVE.

Note that anything here that says it's cross-platform really means it has been abstracted so that alternate platforms can be easily implemented. The only currently tested platform is posix.

rve_common contains some useful classes/utilities. The main piece that could be promoted is the UUID class, which provides a cross-platform UUID class.
rve_dynlib provides a cross-platform low-level dynamic loading interface.
rve_pluginloader provides a plugin-loading interface originally derived from rviz's plugin loading code.
rve_rpc is a service-like implementation built on top of topics. This means it can take advantage of roscpp's no-copy intraprocess message passing. It also has an asynchronous API (though this could be built for services as well).
rve_interface_gen takes an interface specification and turns it into C++ code built on top of rve_rpc
rve_properties is a property tree system meant for loading/storing arbitrary configuration data.

Messages/Interfaces

The message/interface packages are:

3D Rendering

These packages handle the interfaces to rendering 3D data in a scene. RVE's renderer is split into two parts, the client and the server. Splitting it this way provides a number of advantages:

The initial goal with the client/server was to model an Active Object, which allows all rendering to happen in a separate thread from, say, the UI. Because we use rve_rpc for this, it extends to being able to run the render server in another process as well, or even across the network (on, say, a cluster machine).
The only code dependent on ogre is in the server. Replacing ogre with something else (such as raw OpenGL) involves only rewriting the server. None of the client code should need to be modified.
It allows more control over the rendering being done. Everything going through a custom rendering pipeline (as opposed to direct access to Ogre) allows uniform support for picking, lighting, etc.
It opens the possibility of implementing an alternate renderer. For example, one could implement a realtime raytracing renderer for generating super high-quality screenshots or movies

The rendering-related packages themselves are:

rve_render_server provides a render server that is controlled through ROS topics (mainly through rve_rpc/rve_interface_gen), and whose output can be subscribed to as sensor_msgs/Image messages.
rve_render_client provides a client interface to the render server.
rve_mesh_loader provides an interface to load mesh files from various formats into an rve_msgs/Mesh message. This is mainly used by rve_render_client.

Meta-Visualization

The meta-visualization packages map to higher-level concepts useful for writing visualization tools. For example, rve_transformer package creates a Transformer concept that is similar to but more powerful than an rviz Display, the goal being to turn some input data (generally a topic) into renderable output. GUI code that may be useful to multiple projects also fits into this category.