This application is intended to be used to visualize results and data of rigid body dynamics systems. It is build on top of RBDL and uses Qt3D as it's graphics backend.
RBDL-Toolkit is designed to be extendable via plugins and to make developing plugins easy there is a plugin template. There are also some wiki articles describing the architechture of the application.
RBDL-Toolkit now supports loading and displaying of lua and urdf models!
This software is provided as an AppImage for Linux and as an DMG for MACOS. It may even be possible to get this running on Windows by using the Linux Subsystem, and the AppImage. But I have not tried this yet.
Use cmake to build and install, make sure to recursively clone the repository.
git clone --recursive https://github.com/ORB-HD/rbdl-toolkit
- RBDL with minimum version 3.0.0 with error handling rbdl-orb
- Note: currently for urdf models to work there is a PR open on rbdl-orb: while it is not merged please use my fork of (rbdl-orb)[https://github.com/ju6ge/rbdl-orb] this is only required if you want to build rbdl-toolkit yourself. Othewise use the provided AppImage or DMG!
- Eigen3
- Qt5 version >= 5.14
- Qt3D and assimp for model loading
Warning The most stable experience is currently provided with QT version 5.13.2 other version might work but are not guarranted. This is due to the Qt3D Api no being stable yet.
Since our research group is mostly using Ubuntu here is a quick one line install command for all dependencies except RBDL.
sudo apt install qt5* qt3d* libeigen3-dev libassimp-dev mesa-common-dev libboost-dev
Ubuntu installs qt5.9 per default and rbdl-toolkit might work with the exception of the rendering plugin. In order use the rendering plugin you will have to install qt your self. To do this download the open source version of qt from the website and follow the installation instructions. Make sure to install at version 5.13.2 other versions are not guaranteed to work, since Qt3D is at the moment subject to many changes!
Afterwards build rbdl-toolkit with cmake and adding the CUSTOM_QT_PATH variable set to your [QT_INSTALL_DIR]/[QT_VERSION]/[COMPILER]. If you compiled QT yourself just set this variable to the -prefix you used for the compile/install.
For me that looked like this:
cmake -DCUSTOM_QT_PATH=~/Qt5.13/5.13.2/gcc_64 ..
make
The behavior of the toolkit can be adjusted by editing the settings of the
application. To easly change the Settings the Toolkit provides a nice settings editor which
can be accessed via the ui. The settings are stored on disc, on Linux systems it
will be located at ~/.config/ORB/rbdl-toolkit.conf.
Plugins should document their settings in their README files.
rbdl-toolkit supports command line options. To see all available options
execute rbdl-toolkit --help, plugins may add options so make sure all
plugins you want to load are enabled in the settings!
Options may be specified multiple times in order to load multiple models for example.
This Application is extendable with qt plugins. There are two types of Plugins, core plugins and optional plugins. Their interfaces are the same, but a core plugin can not be disabled while the application is running. While the optional plugins can be enabled and disabled.
Core Plugins:
- Animation
- Camera Operator
- Forces and Torques
Optional Plugins:
- Rendering (Picture and Video rendering)
- Motion Marker Plugin
- Inverse Kinematics Plugin
Info To also build the optional plugins you will need to set the cmake option
TOOLKIT_BUILD_OPTIONAL_PLUGINS to ON. This might mean that you will require
additional dependencies like libffmpeg.
If you intend to add new functionality to the toolkit take a look at our wiki. It will cover the basics of creating a new plugin and other information on how to use qt3d.
In the extra folders are some python scripts that might be useful when converting model meshes from meshup to rbdl-toolkit.
If you find bugs or have other questions please file a GitHub issue on this repository.
This work is licensed with the EUPL v1.2.