User defined primitives

[c42f]

A proof of concept hack shows that user defined points of interest can be very useful. We need

• Creation and deletion of points of interest
• Some system to save them to a file (or possibly the log)
• A way of loading them in again

Since these aren't exactly point clouds, we probably need a new geometry type for them; something that has flexible creation/deletion, and displays the points of interest in a visually distinctive way. Since the user is creating the points, it's probably fine to assume that there's not many of them.

Generalizing the concept, it also makes sense to support user-defined lines and planes since these can be useful for measuring things and creating models by hand for checking against automatically generated geometry. The tricky thing will be to keep this lightweight so that displaz doesn't try to grow into a full-blown 3D modeling program.

[r-chris]

This could probably be combined with #83

[c42f]

Hmm, I'm not sure #83 is that closely related. Can you expand on what you're imagining?

Personally I think the new scripting hooks cover this in a rather general and flexible way, so I'm almost inclined to close it now that #92 is done.

[r-chris]

I was imagining this suggestion was about defining your own POI in terms of camera placement / viewport and in turn allowing us to save / load such viewpoints for any dataset. It would allow jump between those different viewpoints and possibly have a Google Earth style camera path animation in between such viewpoints.

On second read I am not so sure any more that this is what you wanted to accomplish here.

[c42f]

Ah yes that makes sense though it's not quite what I was originally going for here - this was meant to be about a way of recording "placemarks" or other geometry by clicking around. I think #92 does cover this nicely for now and is more flexible than anything we could do on the C++ side, so I'm going to close this.