Visworkplan 20110225A

As is standard for Geant4 Planned Features documents,

(1) means expected to be done in first half of year

(2) means expected to be done in second half of year

(*) means may get to this in second half of year or may takelonger

Update DAWN to work on latest versions of Windows - (1)Satoshi

gMocren Application: Release Mac version - (1) Akinori

Only version so far for Mac is an unreleased Alpha version.Need to at least move to a public Beta.

gMocren Application: Fine tune - (1) Akinori

Combine some of the separate menus such that the user cansee at a glance all of the different options for overlays: patient, dose,geometry, trajectories.

Show all options even if some are not available in the datafile, maybe greyed out, so that the user always understands that this tool iscapable of doing all of these overlays.

gMocrenFile: Produce tutorial - (1) Akinori, Kyoko, Satoshi

Improvements to Qt Viewers in QtUI - (1) Laurent

Extend Qt with panels for high-precision values input,hierarchy control, GL-free rendering

Add new panel in order to choose cuts/zoom/rotation/center(better precision than with mouse).

Add new panel to choose displayed volumes as in HepRep.

New driver OGLFile, using OpenGL to make PS, EPS, JPGwithout graphics window - (1/2) Laurent

Possible use includes batch jobs, an environment where thereis no graphics window.

Also support compressed formats, such as ps.gz.

Add commands to DAWNFILE for output file, dir, culling, maxfile num, precision - (1/2/*) Satoshi

Most of these are currently only configurable fromenvironment variables.

Extensions of OpenInventor Viewer - (1/2/*) Rastislav andFred

New functionality motivated by beam line applications, butshould be generally useful.

Save and restore the viewpoint (between runs).

Save and restore a series of viewpoints (in effect, abookmarks file for views) stored in a file.

Interactive editing of viewpoint lists.

Stepwise rotation of views around axes defined locally (e.g.90 degree rotations to obtain projections).

Navigation of the geometry by distance along a user-definedpath.

User selection of view transition options.

Geometry fly-through using SoXtFlyViewer.

Escape key callback to return control to Geant4 UI.

Try to eliminate the need for “escape” by modifying theevent loop to handle terminal input.

Web-Based OpenGL rendering service based on Wt - (2) Laurent

New web-based driver can easily be made as a copy of the Qtdriver.

gMocrenFile: Add support for rendering patient from 3Dparameterization - (2) Akinori

Currently only supports nested and phantomparameterisations.

gMocrenFile: Add an extended example to show how to usegMocrenFile with scorers - (2) Akinori

Enable easy visualization of GPS sources - (2) John

Might be part of a general scheme to visualize primaryparticles.

Could use an interface to the G4Event, or an interface toG4VPrimaryGenerator (so for all guns).

Could show not only the vertex position, but also thedirection, etc.

Might also show the GPS shape, drawing it based on the GPSparameters (centre, radius, etc).

Integrate the Inventor viewers within the QtUI environment -(2/*) Guy and Laurent

QtIU would become the natural UI to play both with OpenGLand Inventor/coin3d for people that look for a solution plugged directly on theG4 kernel.

gMocren Application: Handle scoring on a tetrahedral mesh -(*) Akinori and Satoshi

Not easy. gMocren does not yet support non-regular mesh.

Techniques to display this are only in very early stages ofdevelopment.

Key tasks for which we do not have manpower:

Investigate dynamic loading of visualization drivers - (*)

Change from current flat format to hierarchical format inVRML - (*)

Integrated visualization of field lines - (*)

Electric, magnetic, maybe even gravitational.

Full support for visualization of boolean shapes - (*)

Boolean operations on polyhedral representations of Geant4solids for visualisations were improved in 9.3. But it is still not a generalsolution. It is a workaround based on finding a good way of shifting one solidrelative to the other by a small amount. The most serious computationalproblems arise when faces coincide. We have had a simple shifting algorithm inplace for many years; in 9.3 this algorithm became a little more sophisticated. In a test it fixed 96% of failures. There remains a stubborn 4%. (The effectof a failure is to prevent visualisation of the boolean solid, except with theray tracer driver, which does not rely on polyhedrons.) We might be able tomake the shifting workaround yet more sophisticated but, ideally, we reallyneed a comprehensive solution, a daunting re-write and improvement of the basicfacet-intersection algorithms.