Week 4: Nothing is Ever Lost

Welcome again to another weekly blogpost! Today, let's talk about the importance of guidance throughout a project.

Last Week's Effort

So, last week my project was struggling with some supposedly simple in concept, yet intricate in execution issues. If you recall from my last blogpost, I could not manage to make the Framebuffer Object setup work, as its method, SetContext(), wasn't being able to generate the FBO inside OpenGL. Well, after some (more) research about that as I also dived in my plan B, that involved studying numba as a way to accelerate a data structure I implemented on my PR #783, me and one of my mentors decided we needed a pair programming session, that finally happened on thursday. After that session, we could finally understand what was going on.

Where the Problem Was

Apparently, for the FBO generation to work, it is first needed to initialize the context interactor:

FBO = vtk.vtkOpenGLFramebufferObject()

manager.window.SetOffScreenRendering(True) # so the window doesn't show up, but important for later as well

manager.initialize() # missing part that made everything work


FBO.SetContext(manager.window) # Sets the context for the FBO. Finally, it works
FBO.PopulateFramebuffer(width, height, True, 1, vtk.VTK_UNSIGNED_CHAR, False, 24, 0) # And now I could populate the FBO with textures

This simple missing line of code was responsible for ending weeks of suffer, as after that, I called:

print("FBO of index:", FBO.GetFBOIndex())
print("Number of color attachments:", FBO.GetNumberOfColorAttachments())

That outputted:

FBO of index: 4
Number of color attachments: 1

That means the FBO generation was successful! One explanation that seems reasonable to me on why was that happening is that, as it was not initialized, the context was being passed null to the SetContext() method, that returned without any warning of what was happening.

Here, I would like to point out how my mentor was essential to this solution to come: I had struggled for some time with that, and could not find a way out, but a single session of synchronous pair programming where I could expose clearly my problem and talk to someone way more experienced than I, someone designated for that, was my way out of this torment, so value your mentors! Thanks Bruno!

This Week's Goals

Now, with the FBO working, I plan to finally render something to it. For this week, I plan to come back to my original plan and experiment with simple shaders just as a proof of concept that the FBO will be really useful for this project. I hope the road is less bumpier by now and I don't step on any other complicated problem.

Wish me luck!