I'd like to hear the best means for displaying graphics that move on-screen as an overlay with Python. The intended initial platform is Linux. I've worked up some small demos using PyQt using frameless windows and looping and updating their location on screen. This works, but I have a feeling it is not the ideal solution.
The end result is an activity indicator that would show more objects swarming in an upward direction as activity increased. That would result in spawning perhaps a hundred windows in a go and that is why I think my PyQt demo is not optimal.
I'm open to any suggestions since this will be an open project and installing obscure modules is a non-issue.
There are examples for making transparent / unclickable windows in java and in javascript. Here are a couple of transparency related posts for QT.
Related
I want to visualize one or more STL file(s) using a vtk render viewport inside my application. I was able to get it all running with this example here: https://kitware.github.io/vtk-examples/site/Python/IO/ReadSTL/
My question is as follows: I have a mouse to control it and it is just unbelievable how bad default the controls of the camera are. It is almost impossible to get the model rotated intentionally or focus on a certain part. I am confused as I could not find any topic here or elsewhere discussing this. Normally I would read through other threads to find an answer, but there doesn't seem to be any. So, maybe you can point me to an approach or even certain functions of how I can change these settings, that would be really great! Basically I want to mimic the camera behavior of say, Paraview or a common CAD tool. Like zooming with mouse wheel, rotating with RMB and holding down the wheel to pan.
Some background on my project: I have written a python program and created a quite ok UI using tkinter. However, recently I was thinking of rewriting some basic parts of it and also upgrading everything visually and in terms of handling. So, I want to move to Qt widgets and, there shall be a VTK rendering viewport inside my application to show some of the stuff that can be interacted with.
I was able to find a solution in the tutorials. By explicitly defining the vtkInteractorStyle with
style = vtk.vtkInteractorStyleTrackballCamera()
The handling is just as I wanted it to be.
SO I am infact doing something very similar to this user posts:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6800292/python-ai-and-3d-animation
but it has no answers and I couldn't contact the user.
Basically I have a functioning python script that answers me with an action accordingly to my voice command. (Fetch emails, weather forecast, turn lights ON/OFF, etc), it has been made using the pyspeech library which is pretty darn good.
Now I want to give my programm a "face"! I thought about modelling the face with Blender (have some knowledge and would build up on it) and I know I could animate it, so the lips move and such.
So I want to know if it is at all possible to:
Load the "face" that I made from blender from my main python script (so when my programm start the face would be there on the screen too)
Run from the script the animations such that when for example when my programm says "You're welcome" I would run the animation that the lips move on the face to simulate it is speaking.
I know that blender has a good python integration (maybe correct is to say it is built on?) and that is why I thought it would be a good program to use.
Hope someone can help and tell me if that is at all possible and maybe show me some right way to go, my googling just showed me always python scripting with Blender which is not what I exactly need here... I think...
Cheers,
Flavio
Indeed, what you want is possible.
If all you want is to play pre-rendered animation videos based on decisions on your program, any GUI that allows you to embedd and play video in a widget will do for your application.
You could rool out your own GUI using Pygame (which has video support, but you will need one of the "minor" more or less "amateur" widget toolkits made for pygame to make up the remaining of your application, as pygame is pretty low level.
On a higher level, although I'had not embedded video, I think you could go with PyQT4 (googled a bit, not that many examples either, buthints that there are eamples in QT4 source) or GTK+ (the samething, it looks like there are more examples).
Another option would be to build your application to run inside the Blener Game Engine itself - It offers both a high level Toolkit, and ways to customize behaviors to user actions (even without coding).
The major drawback in doing this is: I don't know which are the options to distribute an application that needs Blender Game Engine nowadays - your users will need to install Blender (but it is likely Blender folks made an easy way to jhandle this).
On the upper hand: you get the most flexibility, it would even be possible to render some sequences in realtime (as opposed to pre-rendered videos) in your app.
One thing: Blender nowadays use Python 3.x - if the other libraries you need are Python 2, you willl need to make one different process for the GUI inside Blender, and exchange data with your application's backeend in Python 2 (for example using jsonrpc or xmlrpc - that is enoguh simple in Python).
Frustrated by lack of a simple ACDSee equivalent for OS X, I'm looking to hack one up for myself. I'm looking for a gui library that accommodates:
Full screen image display
High quality image fit-to-screen (for display)
Low memory usage
Fast display
Reasonable learning curve (the simpler the better)
Looks like there are several choices, so which is the best? Here are some I've run across:
PyOpenGL
PyGame
PyQT
wxpython
I don't have any particular experience with any of these, nor any strong desire to become an expert - I'm looking for the simplest solution.
What do you recommend?
[Update]
For those not familiar with ACDSee, here's what it does that I care about:
Simple list/thubmnail display of images in a directory
Sort by name/size/type
Ability to view images full screen
Single-key delete while viewing full screen
Move to next/previous image while viewing full screen
Ability to select a group of images for:
move to / copy to directory
delete
resize
ACDSee has a bunch of niceties as well, such as remembering directories you've moved images to in the past, remembering your resize settings, displaying the total size of the images you've selected, etc.
I've tried most of the options I could find (including Xee) and none of them quite get there. Please keep in mind that this is a programming/library question, not a criticism of any of the existing tools.
I will recommend using wxPython to create such a viewer, wxPython is easy to learn, free, cross platform and blends well in OSX. Even if you want to use pyopengl, wxPython would be good with pyopengl.
see such tutorials http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/video?name=1790000&fromSeriesID=179
and there is already cornice written in wxpython/PIL, may be you can modify that. It has been inspired by the famous Windows-only ACDSee :)
it's not an answer to your coding question but for (a big part of) the lack of ACDsee equivalent (requires OSX 10.5+):
Simple list/thubmnail display of images in a directory: Finder.app
Sort by name/size/type: Finder.app will do name & type, not image size (but does file size)
Ability to view images full screen: quick preview (spacebar / eye icon)
Single-key delete while viewing full screen: command-backspace while viewing in quickpreview, both windowed and fullscreen
Move to next/previous image while viewing full screen: both quickprewiew (after selecting a group of images or whole directory with cmd-a) and Preview.app
Ability to select a group of images for[...]: Finder.app will does all but resize
seems like you have everything except resize just pressing the spacebar while in finder.
Preview.app will resize both a single image or multiple ones in one batch.
Use an App like Picasa (now available on mac). Use AppleScript through Python to control it from your application.
Failing that, use PyObjC to create Cocoa image display component and dialogs, and so on.
I ended up using PyGame, has been pretty good so far.
I am working on embedded linux platform with limited system resources.
I want to do fullscreen slideshow with simple transistions (like slide in-out, fade in-out ).
I tried PyGtk+GTK+Cairo but its very slow, when I animate GTK image controls I get just two or three frames per second. But smplayer is playing video at good speed!
I did some little research and came to know about directfb, libggi, svgalib etc. and I don't know what library should be used.
Which library is the best for this kind of application? I would prefer to do this without stopping X.
I would try this first using just PyCairo, not using GTK controls at all.
However, if that does not give you the speed that you need, then you might want to try PyGame which gives you access to SDL including OpenGL backends. PyGame is very actively developed and used in building applications that include full screen animation so even if you are not writing a game, you will still likely find the best support by using PyGame.
I'm writing a simulator in Python, and am curious about options and opinions regarding basic 2D animations. By animation, I'm referring to rendering on the fly, not displaying prerendered images.
I'm currently using matplotlib (Wxagg backend), and it's possible that I'll be able to continue using it, but I suspect it won't be able to sufficiently scale in terms of performance or capabilities.
Requirements are:
Cross-platform (Linux, MacOS X,
Windows)
Low complexity overhead
Plays well with wxpython (at least won't step on each other's toes unduly)
Interactivity. Detect when objects are clicked on, moused over, etc.
Note that high performance isn't on the list, but the ability to handle ~100 bitmap objects on the screen would be good.
Your thoughts?
I am a fan of pyglet which is a completely self contained library for doing graphical work under win32, linux, and OS X.
It has very low overhead, and you can see this for yourself from the tutorial on the website. It should play well with wxpython, or at least I seem to recall posts to the mailing list about wxpython and pyglet being used together.
It however does not offer selection of objects via mouse clicks - this you will have to handle yourself. Generally speaking for a 2D application this is not too difficult to do.
mactorii is an OS X application of mine written in pure python+pyglet, and has some basic animation (scrolling) and click detection. It doesn't use wxpython, but perhaps it will give you an idea of what is involved. Note however mactorii is using the old pyglet api, so the run loop I have in there is obsolete. I will get around to updating it one day... :P
You can try pygame, its very easy to handle and similar to SDL under c++
Arcade works on any platform with OpenGL 3.3+ (i.e. not the Raspberry Pi, but most other platforms). Although it's intended for simple games, Arcade offers great bitmap and sprite handling, as well as simple graphics primitives such as rectangles, arcs and circles.