Re: [matplotlib-devel] Some update on GL backend

[Damon M. <dam...@gm...>]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2012 at 11:24:06AM +0200, Nicolas Rougier wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> 
> I'm continuing experimenting various solution for a possible GL backend for matplotlib and I made some progress (but no integration yet).
> 
> You can check results (and experimenting yourself at various places, sorry for that):
> 
> Text : http://code.google.com/p/freetype-gl/
>        http://code.google.com/p/freetype-py/
> 
> Images interpolation & 3D : http://code.google.com/p/glumpy/
> 
> Lines/Shapes : http://code.google.com/p/gl-agg/
> 
> The last experiments (gl-agg) were about high-quality lines and shapes. It seems OpenGL may offer pretty decent quality (IMHO) as you can see on the various screenshots that compare agg and opengl. demo-lines.py and a demo-circles.py show zooming/panning speed (mouse drag / scroll).
> 
> There are still some more work to, mainly concave polygons and bezier filled shapes.
> 
> However, the whole integration into matplotlib may require a lot of work since OpenGL technics may radically differ from their matplotlib counterpart in some case. For example, a grid is rendered using a single shader that manages internally all the lines and ticks. Another example is image interpolation that is done entirely on the graphic card (see glumpy).
> 
> Also, Don't be fooled by the speed of the current demo-lines.py and demo-circles.py because they don't offer the versatility of matplotlib.
> 
> 
> 
> At this point, I may lack time to write the actual integration into matplotlib and I may not know enough the internal matplotlib machinery. Maybe this could be a future project for next year / Google summer of code ? What do you think ?
> 
> 
> Nicolas

Nicholas,

There's a word for people like you: 'Hero'.

The output, in my opinion, looks very nice. Personally, I don't see
myself using this for the two-dimensional stuff unless it's because I
need to quickly look at something (just like you mention on the glumpy
main page), but I think this is a winner for producing 3D plots. GL is a
champion when it comes to 3D rendering, a la MayaVI, VTK or Paraview and
the current mplot3d toolkit is using all of matplotlib's two dimensional
capabilities. I would love to have something like this that mplot3d can
hook into to produce publication-quality visualisations in
three-dimensional space.

I have no experience with the backend side of matplotlib, I just wanted
to say thank you for your effort :)

-- 
Damon McDougall
http://damon-is-a-geek.com
B2.39
Mathematics Institute
University of Warwick
Coventry
West Midlands
CV4 7AL
United Kingdom