Chain Simulation, Scrollbar Refactor, Tutorial Update.

Hello and welcome to my 11th weekly check-in. In this blog I will be discussing my progress with multiple topics related to physics and ui components. I was actively working on a couple of things, specifically Joint simulations in pyBullet and scrollbar UI component. I also took up the responsibility to complete an incomplete Pull Request which was pending for quite a while. The official repository of my sub-org can be found here.

What did you do this week?

The first thing that I did this week was to figure out joint simulations in pybullet. Due to lack of proper documentation I was not aware that Joints are kept stiff by default, hence I had no idea what was wrong with my simulations. Thankfully, while I was browsing pybullet forums, I found this post regarding rope simulations when I realized that I had to explicitly set the friction force to prevent stiffness among the Joints. Keeping this point in mind I was able to simulate the following Chain of hexagonal prisms:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/29832615/89737601-b7613100-da8f-11ea-947f-a96c66caefae.gif

This week I was mainly supposed to work on refactoring scrollbars as a standalone component. I have made some progress for now. I am able to render the scrollbars properly, with proper size, orientation and color but I am having some issues regarding its scrolling callbacks. I need to look further into it. Here’s a brief glimpse:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/29832615/89738159-28a2e300-da94-11ea-9167-e825f82edf98.png

This particular PR by a fellow contributor was pending for quite a while, so I decided to look into it and complete it. The objective of the PR was to add examples for the CheckBox and RadioButton UI components, but the problem was that the objects were not rendered using FURY API in the tutorial, so I decided to complete that. It was already a well made tutorial. I only had to replace the appropriate functions with FURY’s API calls.

The CheckBox tutorial:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/29832615/89438967-20326b80-d767-11ea-8f47-e7711e900c9f.gif

There’s still some internal issues while updating the colors of the cube which is currently being worked on by my mentors.

The RadioButton tutorial:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/29832615/89438999-2e808780-d767-11ea-8b08-2a36a05294bc.gif

What is coming up next week?

Next week I will continue working on the scrollbar component and try to fix the issues that I am having with its callbacks. I will also try to work on the wrecking ball simulation.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

Apart from the scrollbar callbacks and stiff joints, I did not face any major issues.

Thank you for reading, see you next week!!