Librviz Tutorial
================

**The RViz plugin API and library API are preliminary in Fuerte.** We
welcome feedback about how to make them more powerful and easier to
program with. We expect the APIs to change (possibly significantly)
between Fuerte and Groovy.

Overview
--------

RViz is not just a visualizer application, it is also a library!  Much
of RViz's functionality can be accessed within your own application by
linking against librviz.so (or whatever your OS likes to call it).

This tutorial shows a very simple example of creating a 3D visualizer
widget (rviz::RenderPanel), programmatically creating a new Grid
display within it, then using Qt slider controls to adjust a couple of
the grid's properties.  The app is called "myviz".

The source code for this tutorial is in the librviz_tutorial
package. You can check out the source directly or (if you use Ubuntu)
you can just apt-get install the pre-compiled Debian package like so::

    sudo apt-get install ros-fuerte-visualization-tutorials

The running application looks like this:

.. image:: myviz.png

The Code
--------

The code for myviz is in these files: 
:svndir:`src/main.cpp`,
:svndir:`src/myviz.h`, and
:svndir:`src/myviz.cpp`.

main.cpp
^^^^^^^^

The full text of main.cpp is here: :svndir:`src/main.cpp`

.. tutorial-formatter:: ../main.cpp

myviz.h
^^^^^^^

The full text of myviz.h is here: :svndir:`src/myviz.h`

.. tutorial-formatter:: ../myviz.h

myviz.cpp
^^^^^^^^^

The full text of myviz.cpp is here: :svndir:`src/myviz.cpp`

.. tutorial-formatter:: ../myviz.cpp

Building
--------

The full text of CMakeLists.txt is here: :svndir:`CMakeLists.txt`

.. tutorial-formatter:: ../../CMakeLists.txt

Running
-------

Just type::

    rosrun librviz_tutorial myviz

I want to reiterate here the warning at the top of this page, which is
that the APIs will change between Fuerte and Groovy.  I would love for
people to try out these APIs and submit bugs describing problems with
them, so the next version can be much better.