Saturday 13 September 2014

FreeCAD: simple Coin3d plot

Hi all: I'm back!

Some time ago, when I was investigating about octrees and voxels to create a true CNC simulator, I played a bit with Coin3d, the scene graph render of FreeCAD.
Coin3d is coded in C++, but can be accesed with Python using Pivy.

While I didn't find anything specially useful, I realized that one could easily plot math equations like this:


...which have a nice look and permit you to take curious snapshots, for example:



The code is:

from pivy import coin
sg = FreeCADGui.ActiveDocument.ActiveView.getSceneGraph()
print sg
for s in range(5):
  for n in range(-25,25):
    for i in range(-25,25):
      col = coin.SoBaseColor()
      col.rgb=(i*2,n*2,s*2)
      trans = coin.SoTranslation()
      # equation: z = f( i, n ) s is to plot at several heights
      trans.translation.setValue([i*2.5,n*2.5,(i/2.0)**2+(n/2.0)**2+s*5])
      cub = coin.SoSphere()
      myCustomNode = coin.SoSeparator()
      myCustomNode.addChild(col)
      myCustomNode.addChild(trans)
      myCustomNode.addChild(cub)
      sg.addChild(myCustomNode)



More info about FreeCAD and Coin3D, here

Bye!