Articles on Nibba2018's Blog

Google Summer of Code Final Work Product

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 16:17:25 +0000

Google Summer of Code Final Work Product

Name: Soham Biswas
Organisation: Python Software Foundation
Sub-organisation: FURY
Project: FURY - Create new UI Widgets & Physics Engine Integration

Proposed Objectives

ComboBox
Tab UI
File Dialog Improvements

Modified Objectives

ComboBox
Tab UI
File Dialog Improvements
Double Click Callback
TextBlock2D Improvements
Scrollbars as a Standalone Component
Physics Engine Integration

Objectives Completed

ComboBox2D UI Component

A combobox is a commonly used graphical user interface widget. Traditionally, it is a combination of a drop-down list or list box and a single-line textbox, allowing the user to select a value from the list. The term "combo box" is sometimes used to mean "drop-down list". Respective components, tests and tutorials were created.

Pull Requests:

ComboBox UI Component: https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/240
ComboBox UI Tutorial: https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/246

Tab UI Component

In interface design, a tabbed document interface or Tab is a graphical control element that allows multiple documents or panels to be contained within a single window, using tabs as a navigational widget for switching between sets of documents. Respective components, tests and tutorials were created.

Pull Requests:

Tab UI component: https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/252
Tab UI tutorial: https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/275

Double Click Callback

Double click callbacks aren't implemented in VTK by default so they need to be implemented manually. With my mentor's help I was able to implement double click callbacks for all the three mouse buttons successfully.

Pull Requests:

Adding Double Click Callback: https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/231

TextBlock2D Improvements

The previous implementation of `TextBlock2D` was lacking a few features such as size arguments and text overflow. There was no specific way to create Texts occupying a said height or width area. Apart from that UI components like `ListBoxItem2D`, `FileMenu2D` etc had an issue where text would overflow from their specified width. In order to tackle these problems, a modification was done to `TextBlock2D` to accept size as an argument and a new method was added to clip overflowing text based on a specified width and to replace the overflowing characters with `...`.

Pull Requests:

Setting Bounding Box for TextBlock2D: https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/248
Clip Text Overflow: https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/268

Physics Engine Integration

Optional support for Physics engine integration of Pybullet was added to Fury. Pybullet's engine was used for the simulations and FURY was used for rendering the said simulations. Exhaustive examples were added to demonstrate various types of physics simulations possible using pybullet and fury. The said examples are as follows:

Brick Wall Simulation
- Explains how to render and simulate external forces, objects and gravity.
Ball Collision Simulation
- Explains how collisions work and how to detect said collisions.
Chain Simulation
- Explains how to render and simulate joints.
Wrecking Ball Simulation
- A more complicated simulation that combines concepts explained by the other examples.

Apart from that, a document was created to explain the integration process between pybullet and fury in detail.

Pull Requests:

Physics Simulation Examples: https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/287
Fury-Pybullet Integration Docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XJcG1TL5ZRJZDyi8V76leYZt_maxGp0kOB7OZIxKsTA/edit?usp=sharing

Objectives in Progress

Scrollbars as a standalone component

The previous implementation of scrollbars were hard coded into `ListBox2D`. Therefore, it was not possible to use scrollbars with any other UI component. Apart from that, scrollbars in terms of design were limited. Creating a horizontal scrollbar was not possible. The objective of this PR is to make scrollbars separate so that other UI elements can also make use of it.

Currently, the skeletal and design aspects of the scrollbars are implemented but the combination of scrollbars with other UI components are still in progress.

Pull Requests:

Scrollbars as a Standalone API: https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/285

File Dialog Improvements

Currently, we have access to `FileMenu2D` which allows us to navigate through the filesystem but it does not provide a user friendly Dialog to read and write files in Fury. Hence the idea is to create a file dialog which can easily open or save file at runtime. As of now, `Open` and `Save` operations are implemented. Corresponding tests and tutorials are in progress.

Pull Requests:

File Dialog UI component: https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/294

Other Objectives

Radio Checkbox Tutorial using FURY API

The objects for Radio button and Checkbox tutorial were rendered using VTK's method by a fellow contributor so I decided to replace them with native FURY API. The methods were rewritten keeping the previous commits intact.

Pull Requests:

Radio Checkbox tutorial using FURY API: https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/281

GSoC weekly Blogs

Weekly blogs were added for FURY's Website.

Pull Requests:

First & Second Evaluation: https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/272
Third Evaluation: https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/286

Timeline

Date	Description	Blog Link
30-05-2020	Welcome to my GSoC Blog!!	Weekly Check-in #1
07-06-2020	First Week of Coding!!	Weekly Check-in #2
14-06-2020	ComboBox2D Progress!!	Weekly Check-in #3
21-06-2020	TextBlock2D Progress!!	Weekly Check-in #4
28-06-2020	May the Force be with you!!	Weekly Check-in #5
05-07-2020	Translation, Reposition, Rotation.	Weekly Check-in #6
12-07-2020	Orientation, Sizing, Tab UI.	Weekly Check-in #7
19-07-2020	ComboBox2D, TextBlock2D, Clipping Overflow.	Weekly Check-in #8
26-07-2020	Tab UI, TabPanel2D, Tab UI Tutorial.	Weekly Check-in #9
02-08-2020	Single Actor, Physics, Scrollbars.	Weekly Check-in #10
09-08-2020	Chain Simulation, Scrollbar Refactor, Tutorial Update.	Weekly Check-in #11
16-08-2020	Wrecking Ball Simulation, Scrollbars Update, Physics Tutorials.	Weekly Check-in #12
23-08-2020	Part of the Journey is the end unless its Open Source!	Weekly Check-in #13

Detailed weekly tasks and work done can be found here.

Weekly Check-in #13

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 15:50:32 +0000

Part of the Journey is the end unless its Open Source!

Hello and welcome to my final weekly check-in. Today officially marks the end of the coding period for GSoC 2020. I enjoyed every bit of it. This was a life-changing experience for me and now I observe and interpret everything from a different perspective altogether. I have grown into a better developer and a person since GSoC. I would like to thank all my mentors and especially Serge for his immense support and mentorship. I would love to contribute to fury even after GSoC is over but unfortunately my semester break is over so I wont be as active as I was during the summer.

Now, regarding work I will be sharing my progress with the File Dialog UI component. The official repository of my sub-org can be found here.

What did you do this week?

This week I worked on the File Dialog UI component. Fury previously had a FileMenu component which could browse through the file system but we needed a dialog like implementation for it so that its easier for the users to read and write files during runtime. I tried implementing a simple design for it. It specifically has two modes, one for saving files and the other for writing files. The implementation can be demonstrated as follows:

Open Dialog:

Save Dialog:

What is coming up next?

Next week I will start with my final GSoC documentation and code submission. I will also try to implement the tests and tutorials for File Dialog or any further changes requested by my mentors. If I am not able to finish it within the next week, I will get it done after GSoC.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

I did not face any major issues this week.

Thank you all for your love and support. ❤️😄

Weekly Check-in #12

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 15:20:18 +0000

Wrecking Ball Simulation, Scrollbars Update, Physics Tutorials.

Hello and welcome to my 12th weekly check-in. In this blog I will be discussing my progress with the wrecking ball simulation and my scrollbar separation work. Apart from this I have also finalized the physics simulation tutorials and have created a Pull Request to finally get it merged with the official repository. The official repository of my sub-org can be found here.

What did you do this week?

This week I was mainly focusing on the wrecking ball simulation. This simulation is basically the combination of chain simulation and brick wall simulation. A sphere attached to a chain smashes a "NxNxN" brick wall. The simulation is as follows:

There's a rendering bug with the cylinders because of which the chain segments look weird. My mentors confirmed that this bug originated from VTK's `cylinder source` method and they are currently working on it to fix it. The simulation will render correctly once that bug is fixed.

Regarding the scrollbar separation task, I was able to fix those callback issues that I was facing. The mouse callbacks on the scrollbar now work correctly:

I have also created a pull request to add the following physics simulations with proper documentation to the main repository:

Brick Wall Simulation
Ball Collision Simulation
Chain Simulation
Wrecking Ball Simulation

What is coming up next?

Currently I am a bit confused with the implementation of scrollbars with UI components. I had a meeting with my mentor and he decided to help me out with this. So most probably I will be working with the scrollbar component and its implementation. Next week will also be the final week for GSoC 2020 before the evaluations start so I would work on getting the final documentation and formalities ready.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

Apart from the scrollbar implementation idea, I did not face any major issues.

Thank you for reading, see you next week!!

Weekly Check-in #11

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Sun, 09 Aug 2020 17:48:18 +0000

Chain Simulation, Scrollbar Refactor, Tutorial Update.

Hello and welcome to my 11th weekly check-in. In this blog I will be discussing my progress with multiple topics related to physics and ui components. I was actively working on a couple of things, specifically Joint simulations in pyBullet and scrollbar UI component. I also took up the responsibility to complete an incomplete Pull Request which was pending for quite a while. The official repository of my sub-org can be found here.

What did you do this week?

The first thing that I did this week was to figure out joint simulations in pybullet. Due to lack of proper documentation I was not aware that Joints are kept stiff by default, hence I had no idea what was wrong with my simulations. Thankfully, while I was browsing pybullet forums, I found this post regarding rope simulations when I realized that I had to explicitly set the friction force to prevent stiffness among the Joints. Keeping this point in mind I was able to simulate the following Chain of hexagonal prisms:

This week I was mainly supposed to work on refactoring scrollbars as a standalone component. I have made some progress for now. I am able to render the scrollbars properly, with proper size, orientation and color but I am having some issues regarding its scrolling callbacks. I need to look further into it. Here's a brief glimpse:

This particular PR by a fellow contributor was pending for quite a while, so I decided to look into it and complete it. The objective of the PR was to add examples for the CheckBox and RadioButton UI components, but the problem was that the objects were not rendered using FURY API in the tutorial, so I decided to complete that. It was already a well made tutorial. I only had to replace the appropriate functions with FURY's API calls.

The CheckBox tutorial:

There's still some internal issues while updating the colors of the cube which is currently being worked on by my mentors.

The RadioButton tutorial:

What is coming up next?

Next week I will continue working on the scrollbar component and try to fix the issues that I am having with its callbacks. I will also try to work on the wrecking ball simulation.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

Apart from the scrollbar callbacks and stiff joints, I did not face any major issues.

Thank you for reading, see you next week!!

Weekly Check-in #10

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Sun, 02 Aug 2020 17:05:31 +0000

Single Actor, Physics, Scrollbars.

Hello and welcome to my 10th weekly check-in. Second evaluation ended this week and now we move on to our 3rd and final coding period. In today's check-in I will be sharing my progress with the single actor physics simulation that I facing some issues with and I will also be discussing my future plans regarding UI components. The official repository of my sub-org, FURY can always be found here.

What did you do this week?

This week I was able to figure out the uncontrollable spinning problem that I was facing while rendering physics simulations. Specifically the simulation where a brick wall was rendered by a single actor. The spinning problem was as follows:

Here's how the fixed simulation looks like:

I was facing this particular issue because I was directly syncing the orientation of the objects in pyBullet world to the objects in the Fury world. So I decided to apply the change in orientation instead and it worked. In order to achieve this I had to keep track of the bricks' orientation at each step of the simulation, sync the change and then update the tracked orientation. Thankfully, pybullet had convenient tools to achieve this. Here's a snippet on how to update individual objects rendered by a single actor:

def sync_brick(object_index, multibody):
    pos, orn = p.getBasePositionAndOrientation(multibody)

    rot_mat = np.reshape(
        p.getMatrixFromQuaternion(
            p.getDifferenceQuaternion(orn, brick_orns[object_index])),
        (3, 3))

    vertices[object_index * sec: object_index * sec + sec] = \
        (vertices[object_index * sec: object_index * sec + sec] -
         brick_centers[object_index])@rot_mat + pos

    brick_centers[object_index] = pos
    brick_orns[object_index] = orn

All the necessary information is updated here.

What is coming up next?

Currently, the scrollbars are native to ListBox2D only. We are planning to separate scrollbars from ListBox2D to create a standalone UI component. This was in progress previously but was later discontinued, so I was given the responsibility to complete it. After this we plan to improve File Dialog capabilities later on.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

I did not face any major issues but it took me some time to understand and evaluate the existing discontinued PR regarding scrollbar separation.

Thank you for reading, see you next week!!

Weekly Check-in #9

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Sun, 26 Jul 2020 17:26:51 +0000

Tab UI, TabPanel2D, Tab UI Tutorial.

Hello and welcome to my 9th weekly check-in. I will be sharing my progress with TabUI and its corresponding tutorial. The official repository of my sub-org, FURY can always be found here.

What did you do this week?

This week I finished the basic implementation of TabUI. Apart from that I was also able to finish the tutorial which showcases different features of this said UI. With the help of this UI one can have multiple panels containing different UI elements within them. The basic implementation can be demonstrated as follows:

After finishing with the basic implementation I moved on to create its tutorial. For that, I decided to combine 3 of the existing UI tutorials to be rendered with the help of Tab UI. I implemented the following in individual tabs:

Controlling a cube with the help of LineSlider2D and RingSlider2D.
Using a CheckBox to render a cylinder or a sphere or both.
Using ComboBox to set the color of a label.

The above tutorial can be demonstrated as follows:

What is coming up next?

Next week I will continue working on the Physics engine integration. Previously we were facing a problem regarding the uncontrollable spinning of objects rendered by a single actor. There must be an issue with mismatching axes alignment of FURY and pyBullet. The spinning problem is as following:

Did you get stuck anywhere?

I did get stuck with the collapsing functionality of Tab UI and the uncontrollable spinning of the bricks in the Physics simulation. Apart from that I did not face any major issues.

Thank you for reading, see you next week!!

Weekly Check-in #8

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Sun, 19 Jul 2020 21:01:24 +0000

ComboBox2D, TextBlock2D, Clipping Overflow.

Hello and welcome to my 8th weekly check-in. I will be sharing my progress with ComboBox2D and TextBlock2D UI components. After solving TextBlock2D sizing issue, I was finally able to complete the implementation of combo box. I also faced some problems while refactoring TextBlock2D. The official repository of my sub-org, FURY can always be found here.

What did you do this week?

This week I finished the implementation of TextBlock2D and ComboBox2D. I also added necessary tests and tutorials to aid the implementation. It still needs some color design, which will be decided later on. Here's an overview of the tutorial:

Its a simple tutorial where I change the color of the label based on the option selected on the combo box.

Now while refactoring TextBlock2D, I noticed that the Text Overflow workaround on ListBox2D broke and started acting weird. This was mainly because the size implementation was changed and the code that I wrote a few months back wasn't relevant anymore. So I removed the previous code and had to re-implement the same. I later found out that I would be needing such an implementation for most of my UI components so I decided to create a separate method for clipping overflowing texts.

I had to figure out a specific algorithm to achieve this as the height and width of each characters were different and the combined width of multiple characters were not equal to the sum of their widths. I decided to go for a binary search implementation as it was faster compared to a simple linear checking algorithm. The said algorithm works as expected and is more effective compared to its previous implementation. I tweaked the previous combo box example to showcase this algorithm.

The extremely long text is now clipped correctly.

What is coming up next?

Next week, I have a couple of things to work on. Firstly, the single actor wall brick simulation is yet to be completed. Once I am done with that I will continue working on Tab UI and try to finish its skeletal implementation.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

I did get stuck regarding the previous implementation of Text Overflow in ListBox2D. Before the current implementation it looked something like this:

Apart from that, I did not face any major issues.

Thank you for reading, see you next week!!

Weekly Check-in #7

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Sun, 12 Jul 2020 18:53:25 +0000

Orientation, Sizing, Tab UI.

Hello and welcome to my 7th weekly check-in. I will be sharing my progress with single actor physics simulation and TextBlock2D sizing issue which was pending for quite a while now. I will also be sharing my thoughts regarding the TAB UI component. The official repository of my sub-org, FURY can always be found here.

What did you do this week?

This week I was working with the orientation problem I mentioned in my previous check-in. I did have some problems regarding it, but thanks to my mentor I was able to figure it out and implement it with the help of scipy's Quaternion to Rotation Matrix method. After understanding the orientation implementation, I spent some time regarding the design of the TAB UI component. I expect the design to be something similar as follows:

Fortunately, we have good news this week. The TextBlock2D sizing issue that we were facing for quite a while has now been fixed. We simply have to keep track of the scene parameter in the _add_to_scene method of each UI component. This scene parameter inherits vtkViewport, hence it allows us to determine the necessary details about the environment of the 3D objects.

What is coming up next?

As the sizing issue regarding TextBlock2D has been fixed, I am very much eager to finish the remaining work left. ComboBox2D and TextBlock2D were left incomplete because of the issue. Therefore, my main objective next week would be to finish them first. Once I am done with it, I will move on to Tab UI. If not, I will continue with the physics simulation.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

Apart from the orientation and sizing problem, I did not face any major issues.

Thank you for reading, see you next week!!

Weekly Check-in #6

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:03:39 +0000

Translation, Reposition, Rotation.

Hello and welcome to my 6th weekly check-in. The first evaluation period officially ends and I am very excited to move on to the second coding period. I will be sharing my progress with handling specific object's properties among various multiple objects rendered by a single actor. I am mainly focusing on making it easier to translate, rotate and reposition a particular object, so that I can use them to render physics simulations more efficiently. The official repository of my sub-org, FURY can always be found here.

What did you do this week?

Last week I worked on physics simulations rendered in FURY with the help of pyBullet. Now the simulations were highly un-optimized, specially the brick wall simulation as each brick was rendered by its own actor. In other words, 1 brick = 1 actor. Now my objective was to render all the bricks using a single actor, but before jumping into the simulation I had to figure out how to modify specific properties of an individual object. Thanks to my mentor's PR, I was able to experiment my implementations quickly.

Translation:

The algorithm behind translation is to first identify the vertices of the object, then bring the vertices to the origin by subtracting their centers and then adding the displacement vector. The said operation can be achieved by the following snippet:

# Update vertices positions
vertices[object_index * sec: object_index * sec + sec] = \
    (vertices[object_index * sec: object_index * sec + sec] -
     centers[object_index]) + transln_vector

Rotation:

The algorithm behind rotation is to first calculate the difference between the vertices and the center of the object. Once we get the resultant matrix, we matrix multiply it with the rotation matrix and then we further add the centers back to it so that we preserve the position of the object. Rotation matrix can be defined as:

where gamma, beta and alpha corresponds to the angle of rotation along Z-axis, Y-axis and X-axis.

def get_R(gamma, beta, alpha):
    """ Returns rotational matrix.
    """
    r = [
        [np.cos(alpha)*np.cos(beta), np.cos(alpha)*np.sin(beta)*np.sin(gamma) - np.sin(alpha)*np.cos(gamma),
        np.cos(alpha)*np.sin(beta)*np.cos(gamma) + np.sin(alpha)*np.sin(gamma)],
        [np.sin(alpha)*np.cos(beta), np.sin(alpha)*np.sin(beta)*np.sin(gamma) + np.cos(alpha)*np.cos(gamma),
        np.sin(alpha)*np.sin(beta)*np.cos(gamma) - np.cos(alpha)*np.sin(gamma)],
        [-np.sin(beta), np.cos(beta)*np.sin(gamma), np.cos(beta)*np.cos(gamma)]
    ]
    r = np.array(r)
    return r

vertices[object_index * sec: object_index * sec + sec] = \
    (vertices[object_index * sec: object_index * sec + sec] -
     centers[object_index])@get_R(0, np.pi/4, np.pi/4) + centers[object_index]

Reposition:

Repositioning is similar to that of translation, except in this case, while repositioning we update centers with the new position value.

new_pos = np.array([1, 2, 3])

# Update vertices positions
vertices[object_index * sec: object_index * sec + sec] = \
    (vertices[object_index * sec: object_index * sec + sec] -
     centers[object_index]) + new_pos

centers[object_index] = new_pos

What is coming up next?

Currently, I am yet to figure out the orientation problem. Once I figure that out I will be ready to implement simulations without any major issues. I am also tasked with creating a wrecking ball simulation and a quadruped robot simulation.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

I did face some problems while rotating objects. My mentors suggested me to implement it via rotation matrix. I still haven't figured out the orientation problem, which I plan to work on next. Apart from these I did not face any major issues.

Thank you for reading, see you next week!!

Weekly Check-in #5

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 13:44:15 +0000

May the Force be with you!!

Hello and welcome to my 5th weekly check-in, I will be sharing my progress of pyBullet Physics Engine Integration with FURY. The official repository of my sub-org, FURY can always be found here.

What did you do this week?

Last week due to the vtkTextActor sizing issue I was not able to continue my work with ComboBox2D UI element. Thus, I decided to work on the "Physics Engine Integration" part of my project. It took me quite a while to understand the terminology of various methods and algorithms used for detection and physics simulation. Nevertheless, I was able to create a couple of rigid body examples to showcase the integration procedure. For physics calculations we used pyBullet and for rendering we used FURY. In other words, pyBullet will handle the backend part of the simulation and FURY will handle the frontend. I have documented the entire integration process here in detail.

Ball Collision Simulation:

For the first example, I created a simple collision between two balls in which two spheres were created both in FURY and pyBullet world and then both the worlds are connected by syncing the position and orientation of the said bodies. Timer callback is created to update the positions and to simulate Physics for each step.

Brick Wall Simulation:

For the second example I tried to increase the complexity of the simulations by increasing the number of dynamic objects. Here a brick-wall is created using 100 bricks and then a ball is thrown at it. The rest of it is simulated. The same concepts from the first example is used to render the second one. Timer callback is created to update position of all the objects and to simulate Physics for each step.

What is coming up next?

In the above examples I used a separate actor for each object which is highly un-optimized. Thus, my mentor suggested me to render all the bricks using a single actor, so that the simulation is more optimized. I am not very confident in changing the position and orientation of different objects rendered by a single actor. Therefore, I will have to research a bit more about it. Apart from that I will also try to work on Constraint based simulation examples if possible.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

The pyBullet documentation isn't well written for cross rendering, hence it was a bit of a challenge for me to implement the integration. I also faced a problem regarding the offset of actors between the FURY world and pyBullet world. Both use different coordinate systems for rendering and simulation because of which I had a constant offset between the objects during simulations. I was able to fix it by converting one coordinate system to the other. Apart from this I did not have any major issues.

Thank you for reading, see you next week!!

Weekly Check-in #4

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 14:05:47 +0000

TextBlock2D Progress!!

Hello and welcome to my 4th weekly check-in, I will be sharing my progress with TextBlock2D UI component. The official repository of my sub-org, FURY can always be found here.

What did you do this week?

This week my objective was to work on the TextBlock2D resizing feature and also work on the scrollbar bug in ComboBox2D UI component. The TextBlock2D component makes use of vtkTextActor and its methods available in VTK for handling all Text related properties such as font size, color, background color etc. Now, going through the official docs I figured out that the there were three different scaling modes for the said actor:

TEXT_SCALE_MODE_NONE
TEXT_SCALE_MODE_PROP
TEXT_SCALE_MODE_VIEWPORT

The first scaling mode was currently implemented in FURY's TextBlock2D code base. This was done mainly because the only way for the user to create a text block was by providing the font size as parameter. We couldn't use the third option as the FURY API tries to maintain abstraction by not exposing vtkViewport parameter. Now in order to allow size as a parameter I had to use the second scaling option which is TEXT_SCALE_MODE_PROP. With this mode one can set the Position2 parameter to the desired value of height and width. But the problem is I cannot use this for the combobox element as the background size will be inconsistent with respect to font size and text length.

Therefore, as a solution we agreed to add a separate Rectangle2D UI component as the background for Text Block along with vtkTextActor. With this implementation one can easily manipulate the background irrespective of the text properties. But this had another issue, the user now had 2 different ways of initializing a TextBlock2D. Therefore, when the user uses size a constructor parameter, then everything works in sync, but the same is not true for the font size parameter. This is mainly because we do not have a specific way of determining the size of the actor based on font size. My mentors have agreed to look into this problem and advised me to focus on something else instead.

What is coming up next week?

Next week I am planning to start with Physics engine integration of FURY with pyBullet. My main focus would be to create simple simulations first before initiating the integration process. If the size issue is solved before I move into Physics engine then I would complete the ComboBox UI and start with Tab UI instead. I have also fixed the scrollbar bug.

Did you get Stuck anywhere?

The main problem that I faced so far was regarding the variable background size of the Text Block component. Also the GetPosition2 method of vtkTextActor would always return the same value irrespective of the font size parameter passed as a constructor argument. Therefore, it was not possible for me to determine the actual size or bounding box of the said text actor.

Thank you for reading, see you next week!!

Weekly Check-in #3

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 12:18:56 +0000

ComboBox2D Progress!!

Hello and welcome to my third weekly check-in, I will be sharing my progress with the project so far. In case you wondered, the sub-org that I am affiliated to is FURY. Make sure to check out the official repository here.

What did you do this week?

This week my objective was to work on the sizing and positioning issue regarding the sub-components of the ComboBox2D UI element. After countless debugging sessions and my mentor's support, I was successfully able to fix the issue. I also developed helpful methods and callbacks for this element to allow users to interact with them in a user friendly manner. I also wrote tests for the same. So far the said progress can be summarized via this gif:

What is coming up next week?

Unfortunately, one of the sub-components TextBlock2D, didn't have a resizing feature that I could make use of for this new UI component. Thus, I need to add that feature on a different PR. This feature will also be required while building other UI elements therefore adding this feature is currently my top priority. There's also a bug regarding the scrollbar that needs to be fixed. The scrollbar overshoots the specified combobox area after new items are appended to the combobox's list of items during runtime. Hopefully I will be able to get them done by next week.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

I was really confused with the coordinate system of Panel2D that was the main reason why components were misplaced. I also faced some issues regarding the scrollbar callback as it wasn't scrolling the elements properly, the items were stuck in place. So far I was able to fix them. Apart from these, I didn't face any major issues.

Thank you for reading, see you next week!!

Weekly Check-in #2

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 14:07:21 +0000

First week of coding!!

Hello and welcome to my second weekly check-in, I will be sharing my progress for the first week of coding.

What did you do this week?

This week my objective was to create the skeleton model for ComboBox2D UI element along with its required sub-components and their respective default callbacks. So far, I have successfully been able to implement them. Apart from some issues that I was facing regarding the sizing and position of the sub-components.

What is coming up next week?

Next week, my main focus will be on fixing the sizing issue and I will also be working on respective default and specialized class methods required by the component and its sub-components for proper functioning. I will also create tests for the same.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

The main problem that I faced while coding the UI element was regarding the sizing and positioning of the sub-components. The sub-components appeared flipped and the TextBlock2D element had no option to resize based on a particular width & height definition.

As you can see, the ComboBox UI element doesn't look the way its supposed to. Along with this issue the scrollbars callback doesn't work either. Hopefully, I will be able to get these issues fixed by next week.

Thank you for reading, see you next week!!

Weekly Check-in #1

SohamBiswas41@gmail.com (Nibba2018) — Sat, 30 May 2020 16:07:26 +0000

Welcome to my GSoC Blog!!!

Hello Everyone, this is Soham Biswas currently in 2nd year pursuing my Bachelor’s(B.Tech) degree in Computer Science & Engineering from Institute of Engineering & Management, Kolkata. I have been selected for GSoC' 20 at sub-org FURY under the umbrella organization of Python Software Foundation. I will be working on building sci-fi-like 2D and 3D interfaces and provide physics engine integration under project titled "Create new UI widgets & Physics Engine Integration".

What did you do during the Community Bonding Period?

Due to the pandemic outbreak and the country wide lockdown in India, many places including my university were closed and therefore I decided to get a head start and start with the project early. During the community bonding period, we had video conference meetings with our mentors and the project's core team. We interacted with each other and discussed the implementation details and their respective deadlines for the entire event period. We will be having such meetings every week on Wednesday in order to update ourselves about the progress of our respective tasks.

I completed the remaining Pull Requests that I had pending before the GSoC students announcement. I also reviewed other issues and pull requests to make sure everything remains up-to-date.

What is coming up next week?

Currently, I am focusing on building the ComboBox2D UI element. I will try to get the skeleton model, required sub-components and their respective default callbacks done by next week.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

While working with my previous PR related to Double Click callbacks, I faced an issue where I was unable to create and implement User Events properly in VTK. Thankfully, my mentors helped me out I was able to implement double click callbacks for all three mouse buttons successfully.

See you next week, cheers!!