Viewer

If you have completed the Hello World section. You probably have used the viewer already. In this section we explain how to use the GUI of the viewer.

Free Camera Control

Use the following keys to move the free camera around:

w move forward.

s move backward.

a move to the left.

d move to the right.

Press the Right Mouse Button and drag in the scene to rotate the camera.

Press the Middle Mouse Button and drag in the scene to translate the camera. This allows moving the camera up and down.

All the operations above will be slower if Shift key is pressed. The speed can also be changed in the Control Window described below.

Actor Selection

Aim the mouse cursor at an actor in the scene and press Left Mouse Button to select it. The selected actor should become translucent and a set of coordinate axes will be placed at the origin of this actor. If the selected actor is an articulation link with a revolute parent joint, a magenta line will appear to indicate the rotation axis. For prismatic parent joint, a cyan line will show the translation axis.

Information of the selected actor will be displayed in the Entity Window described in detail below. The figure below shows selecting an actor without a movable parent joint and an actor with a parent revolute joint.

Focused Camera Control

Press f when an actor is selected will enter the Focused Camera Control mode. In this mode, the center of the camera will be “focused” on the selected object. In this mode, the Right Mouse Button rotates around the object instead of the camera center. Additionally the Mouse Wheel can be used to zoom in and out. The Shift key can still be used to slow down the camera movement. Pressing any of wasd will put you back into the Free Camera Control.

Control Window

The control window (shown below) by default appears at the top-left of the GUI.

The Pause checkbox, when checked, will pause the simulation (entering an infinite rendering loop). You can still move the viewer camera around and even change the pose of objects (details in later sections). The Single Step button let you jump out of the rendering loop for once.

The Camera Speed section allows you to adjust the speed for various mouse operations. Move slider adjusts movement speed of wasd. Rotate adjust the rotating speed when pressing down Right Mouse Button. Scroll adjusts the zoom speed in Focus Camera Control.

The Name selection in Camera section allows viewing from mounted cameras in the scene. It will follow the movement of the selected mounted camera. Fov Y changes the FOV of the viewer camera.

The Display Settings section allows adjusting some display settings. Target changes the displayed picture (picture names are specified in the GLSL shaders provided by SAPIEN). Resolution changes the window resolution (note this may not always succeed as window managers can override this setting, for example, it has no effect in full-screen mode).

The Selection section adjust entity selection behavior. Show Joint Axes allows showing the revoltue/prismatic axes of articulation joints. Show Origin Frame checkbox can turn on/off the axes display. Frame Size adjusts the size of the axes. Opacity adjusts the opacity of the selected actor.

Finally FPS displays the current rendering FPS. Note this value does not represent the time to render a frame, as it is v-synced and affected by CPU operations (simulation, Python code execution, etc.)

Scene Window

The Scene Window by default is located at the bottom-left corner of the GUI. It displays information about entities in the scene By expanding the scene, you can inspect all entities currently placed in the scene. The currently selected entity will be highlighted. Left Click on any actor will select it as if it is clicked in the scene viewport. This allows you to select entities without a visual body.

Entity Window

The Entity Window by default is located at the top-right corner of the GUI. It displays information about the selected entity.

Entity Window first displays the entity name and per_scene_id. Next the global position and rotation (quaternion wxyz) are shown.

Next, each attached component will have its own section. For example, an PhysxArticulationLinkComponent shows its mass, inertia, collision shapes. And allows showing/hiding collision shape with a click.

Each collision shape is expandable. Depending on the collision type, you can see its type-specific information such as radius or scale. Some common attributes are the following. Contact offset the maximum distance where the shape will come into contact with other shapes. Rest offset the distance where the shape will collide with other objects (usually 0). Patch radius and Min patch radius are related to the torsional friction of contact points. Static friction and Dynamic friction are the friction coefficients. Restitution is the restitution coefficient of this shape. Next 4 collision groups are shown in hexadecimal.

Articulation Window

The Articulation Window by default is located at the bottom-right corner of the GUI. It displays information about the parent articulation of selected actor.

First, the Name, Type and Base Link Id of the articulation are displayed. Next in the expandable section Joints. The joint position and joint name for each joint is displayed. On the right of the joint names, there are some + buttons to allow further expanding each joint. When expanded, you can change the Drive Target, Damping, Stiffness, Force Limit, and Friction of this joint. Simply type in the desired number and press Enter. The Acceleration checkbox indicates whether this joint is driven by force or acceleration. When driven by acceleration, the drive force scales automatically by the mass and inertia of the driven object. Finally, the Show, Hide collision buttons are a convenient way to see the collision shapes for the entire articulation.

Transform Window

The Transform Window allows you to move objects in the scene directly. When enabled, A gizmo will be placed at the origin of the selected entity. Dragging the handles will display a translucent image of the object being moved, and clicking on teleport will set the pose of the selected entity to the new pose. The gizmo control can be fine-tuned in the Transform Window to allow translating and rotating in local or world frame.

If the selected entity has a PhysxArticulationLinkComponent, the Gizmo additionally spuports moving with inverse kinematics (IK). The joints that are allowed to particilate in IK computation can be changed in the Move Group. Now dragging the Gizmo will invoke an IK solver to compute proper articulation joint angles.