vtkAngleRepresentation2D calculation bug? - vtk

I use vtkAngleRepresentation2D (with vtkAngleWidget) from VTK 5.X. It seems like this class provides different values for the same angle. The representation draws the current angle value on the vtk window (e.g. 103.205), but the method getAngle() provides a minimal different value (e.g. 103.408)?
Does anybody know why or how to avoid this behavior? I want both interfaces to provide the absolute same value.
Regards,
Michael

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VTK: display integration point data

I'm working with the VTK library in C++.
I have a mesh given as an unstructured grid and certain data given on integration points of gaussian quadrature on the cells (which was created by an external solver). For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that we talk about scalar data.
I also have a tool which displays VTK data graphically. What I want is to display the mentioned data with that tool, simply as interpolated/extrapolated scalar data on the whole grid.
My question is, is there something native to VTK with which I can give the mesh the scalar data at the integration points in some way and VTK handles the interpolation and extrapolation?
I mean, I could write an algorithm that processes the data, creates a new grid in which the cells do not share nodes (as the extrapolated values might not be continuous there), extrapolate the scalars to those nodes for each cell and then display that. However, by this I take away from the native possibilities of the VTK library (which seems to be quite strong in most other regards) and I don't want to reinvent the wheel anyway.
From https://vtk.org/Wiki/images/7/78/VTK-Quadrature-Point-Design-Doc.pdf, I am aware that there is the vtkQuadratureSchemeDefinition class and I think I know how to handle it, and I noticed vtkQuadraturePointInterpolator, which seems to do the opposite of what I'm searching for - interpolation to the integration points rather than extrapolating from them.
The newest entry in the VTK wiki otherwise seems to be https://vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/VTK_integration_point_support, which seems to be quite old, given that it pleads for the existence of some sort of quadrature point support in general, which currently already exists.
Also there is a question in the VTK mailing list which looks just like my question here:
https://public.kitware.com/pipermail/vtkusers/2013-January/078077.html, which seems to be without an answer.
Likewise, the issue https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/issues/17124 also seems to be about what I want to do, and it might hint at it currently not being possible, but it existing as an issue does not imply that it is not already solved (especially with no asignee to the issue).

Increasing OpenGL's far clip plane distance

I'm trying to make a C++ OpenGL representation of our Solar System as a way to teach myself OpenGL, so please keep your answers simple.
The problem I have is that planets are very far away, so everything else is beyond the clipping plane when viewing from any given planet. How do I move the clipping of C++ OpenGL 3.1 plane to, say, 2000000000? I'd prefer a simple code snippet if you can.
I've looked up SO and forum posts about this, but they're either so old that nothing applies (using legacy APIs or just dead links), or so complex that I can't work out what they're saying.
Clipping planes are defined by the perspective projection matrix.
If you use glFrustum, change the last argument passed to it to 2000000000.0.
If you use your own matrix, set 10th element of your matrix array to:
(2000000000.0+nearClippingPlane)/(nearClippingPlane-2000000000.0)
(the formula is (far+near)/(near-far))
and 14th to:
(-4000000000.0*nearClippingPlane)/(2000000000.0-nearClippingPlane)
(the formula is (-2.0*near*far)/(far-near))
2000000000 is very big value, however, so Z-fighting may occur if you add details such as mountains.

With the Haskell graphics library Gloss, is it possible to mask a picture to only display in a certain extent (ie within a rectangle)

I have been using the Gloss Library for some game programming, and have got to the point where I am having the most difficulty laying out different elements on the screen. I was wondering whether it was possible to limit a Picture type to display only a certain rectangular area of the screen. The library already has the concept of a rectangular area with the Extent type, but there does not appear to be any way to 'subtract' from pictures.
If there was a way of doing this then it seems like creating a View type or similar that takes over responsibility for a certain area of the screen — which can also contain additional views, and with suitable coordinate substitutions between them etc — would be an achievable and sensible goal. But without a way to limit drawing areas it doesn't seem like this would be possible within the Gloss framework.
It seems that clipping is not supported in Gloss.
Nevertheless the recursive drawing of views each with their own relative coordinate system does still seem to be a viable and useful goal, and I am part way through writing code for this now.

Texture coordinates: how to calculate them?

Is there a formula that i can use to calculate texture coordinates for a complex object not something like cube or sphere?
The texture coordinates are usually set manually by whoever creates the model, using the modelling package.
There are ways of automating the whole process, to a great extent. The results may not be much use if somebody is going to draw the texture based on the UV coordinates, and if you ask the impossible (e.g., mapping a sphere exactly, with no distortion and no seams) then you may not get perfect results -- but for processes such as light mapping this is a common approach.
Levy's LSCM is one approach, as used in Blender, for example. See http://alice.loria.fr/index.php/publications.html?Paper=lscm#2002
Direct3D9 has a UV unwrap tool in its D3DX library; I'm not sure what algorithm it uses, and the documentation isn't amazing, but it does work. See
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb206321(VS.85).aspx
(Most 3D modelling packages have some kind of automated UV unwrap, too, but in general they never seem to have had too much time spent on them. Presumably the expectation is that somebody will want to go through and fix it up by hand afterwards anyway.)

Simple C/C++ library for triangle-intersection acceleration structure

I'm raytracing and would like to speed it up via some acceleration structure (kd-tree, BVH, whatever). I don't want to code it up myself. What I've tried so far:
Yanking the kd-tree out of pbrt. There are so many intra-dependencies that I couldn't succeed at this without pulling all of pbrt into my code.
CGAL's AABB tree. Frustratingly, this seems to return only the point of intersection. Without knowing which triangle the point came from, I can't efficiently interpolate color over the triangle. I'd love to just extend the notion of "Point" with color, but this doesn't seem possible without writing a lot of template code from scratch.
Writing my own. Okay so I wrote my own grid acceleration class, and it works, but it's nasty and inefficient.
So, if anyone can suggest a simple library that I can use for this purpose I'd really appreciate it! All I need is given a triangle soup and ray, find the closest intersection and return the index of that triangle.
Jaco Bikker wrote this series of tutorials: http://www.devmaster.net/articles/raytracing_series/part7.php
They're very helpful and he includes code at the end for a ray tracer using a kd-tree.
You might be able to use that.
The G3D engine has a ray tracing implementation. Not sure how efficient it is though. It shouldn't bee too much trouble to use the Tree implementation without the rest of the library.

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