Read Me

odeViz: (or as I use to say: ode - visualization)


0. Contact: 
===========

If you change the code, improve this project, fix bugs, or just have comments, 
feel free to contact me...

André Dietrich: dietrich@ivs.cs.uni-magdeburg.de

Website: http://eos.cs.ovgu.de/en/crew/dietrich


1. Preface: 
===========

I wrote this simple library, because I was fed up with dealing with the visualization for every ode-simulation. All geometrical information are allready within the simulation, so why was it not done automatically.


2. Requirements: 
================

Open Dynamics Engine: http://www.ode.org
----------------------------------------
Download the current version, compile it or use binary-packages. 

PyODE: http://pyode.sourceforge.net
-----------------------------------
This is the ode-interface for Python, it also contains the xode-project, which enables the definition of ode-simulations with XML. See the ReadMe for further
installation information. 

Visualization Toolkit (VTK): http://www.vtk.org
-----------------------------------------------
Download VTK if you haven't insalled it yet and compile it with Python support. See also ReadMe for further installation information.

Additional:
-----------
If you are using Linux as I do (Ubuntu), nearly all of these tools and libraries can be installed from precompiled versions. But for xode you will have to download PyODE from http://pyode.sourceforge.net.


3. Install: 
===========

Using ``pip``::

    $ pip install odeViz

From a tarball::

    $ python setup.py install


4. Running the examples:
========================

I put two examples in this project, one (tutorial3.py) was taken from the PyODE-tutorial. In fact it is the same, I just removed all OpenGL-functionality. The second example (test.py) shows, how easy it is to define a simulation for ode with an XML document (see test.xml). To run this example you will have to use xode.

For further explanation, have a look at our tutorial at: http://www.aizac.info/projects/ode-viz