How to visualize the experiments

Hi,

Thank you for releasing the code for this amazing project.

When I tried to run some of the python simulation code like python exp_throw.py, MeshCat world was empty and did not have any robot or marble. I can convert the experiments records to 3d obj mesh files using the convert_history.py script, but I still have to visualize those records separately. What is the expected way to visualize these experiments?

I am running on Ubuntu 18.04. The code is compiled with 3.21.3 with gcc 8.4.0 and cuda 10.2

Thank you.

Hi, thanks for your question. Seems that I can visualize the scene in meshcat on my machine. It looks like this,

If you change the end_epoch to end_epoch = 1. Can you see the visualization?

diffarticulated/python/exp_throw.py

Line 135 in 992a8e9

end_epoch = 60

It does happen that some parts cannot be visualized. You can see in my screenshot where a part was missing.

Thanks for the reply! I can see the visualization now when I changed the end_epoch to 1. It does seem that parts of the robot arm cannot be visualized sometimes. Do you know why that might be?

Great to know it works!

I have no idea why meshcat cannot visualize all the parts. Therefore, I only used it as an on-the-fly proof of concept and render the nice pictures using Blender.

Thanks for the explanation! I am also very curious about that process with Blender. Is that the purpose of those 3d object files generated after running experiments? Could you share any pointers on how I can generate these nice pictures?

Sure, Blender has a decent rendering engine. We can import those .obj files into Blender and customize the textures, background, lighting, shaders, etc. Some of my background hdri resources are from this site https://polyhaven.com/

Thank you so much for the help! I will certainly take a closer look.