Project 1 - Grand Canyon

Project 1 - Grand Canyon Visualization

Ratko Jagodic

February, 2004

The whole project was created in Python using VTK libraries with Tk/Tkinter for designing the user interface.

(source file - canyon.py - can be run on the dual display machine in EVL where class meets)

(data files: canyon_elev.raw & canyon_rgb.raw)

Things that do work:

Height field representation
- Greyscale elevation
- Colormap elevation
Contours
Basic user interaction: zooming, rotating, panning
Different levels of detail for improved user interaction but still recognizable data
Smoothing of surface by computation of normals
Height elevation scaling
Changing scalar mappings for contours
Basic user interface for controlling the above

Things that do not work:

Texture map (displays only one color, probably because I was not using vtkMergeFilter)
Contours do not have fixed colors (red, blue, green and yellow) but rather they change according to the scalar value they represent
The visualization does not automatically redraw because of the preformance issues (I tried it and it was just too slow to interact with)
There is no second dataset to choose from

Screenshots:

Height Field elevation data with small height scaling factor.

Height field with greater height scale factor and zoomed in.

Colormap of the height elevation data.

Contours, top view.

Contours, side view. Just to illustrate that they are mapped to a warped surface and not just a plane.

LOD actor in action during interaction!

This is what the texture looks like (not good) :(