Animated mesh marker visualization plugin and accompanying ROS messages for Rviz
NOTE: This Rviz plugin has only been tested on ROS Hydro. It will not work on ROS Groovy.
Rviz currently does not play back animations contained in 3D meshes loaded from a visualization_msgs/Marker with type MESH_RESOURCE.
This might be useful for displaying nice visualizations of e.g. walking persons in an environment.
Instead of modifying the source code of the original Rviz default_plugin, the animated_marker_rviz_plugin replicates part of that code
and adds the required functionality specific to this purpose.
Run the following to publish example markers and see the visualization in Rviz.
roslaunch animated_marker_tutorial animated_walking_man.launch
The usage of this package is very similar to using visualization_msgs/MarkerArray and visualization_msgs/Marker. Instead, just publish
animated_marker_msgs/MarkerArray. The only supported marker type is AnimatedMarker.MESH_RESOURCE.
The animated_marker_rviz_plugin automatically registers itself with Rviz once the package is sourced (type eg. "source devel/setup.sh"
in your catkin workspace). You can then add an AnimatedMarkerArray display by clicking on the "Add display" button.
Currently, only OGRE *.mesh files (along with *.skeleton files) are supported for animation. These can be exported using e.g. Easy Ogre Exporter (http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=Easy+Ogre+Exporter) from 3DS Max or Blender Exporter (http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/Blender+Exporter) from the free Blender software.
The animated_marker_rviz_plugin code is based upon original code from the default_plugin in ros-visualization/rviz (original authors Dave Hershberger, David Gossow, Josh Faust). The sample animated human mesh is a free low-poly mesh downloaded from mixamo.com, and the walking animation has been taken from the Carnegie Mellon Motion Capture Database (or, more specifically, https://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/cgspeed/motion-capture/cmu-bvh-conversion).