December 2004 - Therion

Help - my cave is inside-out
by Wookey 08 Jan '05

08 Jan '05

Hi guys, Lots of notes here on things I found and suggestions for improvements, but the important one first: I'm getting the hang of this and have drawn up some cave. It went OK until I got to a complicated section, with an underlying streamway adn overlying passages. The streamway needs to be a separate scrap. But I haven't got that far. One bit of wall wasn't shown. By adding a map-fg colour I could see that therion is very confused about what is the inside and what is the outside of the scrap. Here is the set of files needed to process this example: http://trilogy-gw.aleph1.co.uk/~wookey/files/bluemoon.tgz including the offending background image. You can see from the included pdf (also here: http://trilogy-gw.aleph1.co.uk/~wookey/files/bluemoon.pdf what the problem is. I;ve tried reversing some lines and reading the thbook, but I don;t know how to fix this. Does it in fact need to be split up into smaller, simpler scraps? why? I am hesitant to use smaller scraps on this drawing because none of the joins work when I just do join scrap1 scrap2 - it joins lines to the wrong places. I have to use explicit line ID's, which is really tedious - add line in map editor then add then to join command in text editor. Being able to graphically describe joins (at letsfor joins within one .th2 file) would be a really useful improvement. I'll send a separate mail for my other notes. Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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Importing surveys with no data
by Wookey 31 Dec '04

31 Dec '04

We have a number of pre-1990 surveys in mulu for which all the centreline data has been lost but we still have the drawn up surveys. We have regenerated centreline data by inventing survey stations and legs and working out XYZ coordinates for them (very laboriously)2, but now I am putting these surveys into Therion. At the moment I am using the XYZ base survey data and putting in stations for these on the plan. However the positions of these stations on the drawing are very aproximate (I don't actually have the original plot showing exactly where the made-up stations are - one can just just guess from the look of the survey). But this introduces errors of approx the width of the passage, which can be several meters, and is adding distortion to the drawings I am putting in. I am wondering if there is a better way - so I put the drawings in and say 'these are all we have - you work it out', rather than using ill-defined stations which were only made up by taking off this very same drawing in the first place but now they have been through numerous innacuracies and distortions. Can therion do this? And how would I work out the scaling? Can I use a scale bar or something and just copy the scale into each scrap? Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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debug mode
by Wookey 29 Dec '04

29 Dec '04

OK - I turned 'debug on' in layout and now I get pretty images like this: http://trilogy-gw.aleph1.co.uk/~wookey/files/bluemoon.pdf I can see that the black linesare the final result and the red lines are the initial positions of the scrap walls, but what do the yellow lines/triangles indicate. It looks like distortions or distortions at joins? As you can see something has gone badly wrong in the upper centre of this image - I'm just trying to work out what... Also - as you can see on that pdf I am not getting any transparency on overlaying passages (despite having 'transparency on', 'opacity 50'). How do I fix that? or is it just that my viewer (xpdf) can't do it and it is just output into the PDF? Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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arranging files and surveys
by Wookey 21 Dec '04

21 Dec '04

I'm a bit lost about how files scraps and surveys should relate. Therion encourages drawing s complex junction chamber as one scrap, but that tends to mean that one scrap now has stations fromseveral surveys in it. How shold these be labelled and where in the hierarchy should the files be 'input'? In general scrapsdon't match to surveys very well at all, but if you don't incldue a .th2 file in the .th file within a survey/endsurvey pair then presumably the station labels need full names not just numbers? I'm not sure when I start drawing whether it will all be one survey so I can just use numbers or if it will be several surveys and I'll need to use full names - and it's a paid to go back afterwards and change them. What is the recommended way to deal with scrap/survey mismatches? Do you have a file for each scrap, put all scraps inthe samesurvye in one file? etc. I've got a huge cave and I'm going to get in a mess over this if I don't have a sensible structure. Suggestions welcome. And I see therion now gives scraps names automatically, based on the item-number, so you get scraps 1, 36, 90, 109 in your file. I think it would be better if it named the scraps 1, 2, 3, 4 - I'd find that less confusing. Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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No x-size for pillar?
by Wookey 20 Dec '04

20 Dec '04

I just got the error -x-size not valid with type pillar I have a passage with a load of pillars in it here - of varying size and width. I don't want 27 identical pillars - so orientation, and X and Y sizes are important to make it look realistic (some are huge) and not computer-drawn. Can we update therion to draw an ellipse for the pillar according to the x, y and orientation values, or at least accept them quietly for the time being? Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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Therion Wiki pages
by Martin Budaj 20 Dec '04

20 Dec '04

Hello all, with the help of Lada Blazek we added Wiki pages to Therion homepage (therion.speleo.sk/wiki.php). You may edit them, ask questions, answer them, contribute examples, translate the documentation or whatever is missing on the official pages. Cheers, Martin

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Therion hangs occaisionally
by Wookey 17 Dec '04

17 Dec '04

I've had therion 0.3.3 hang on me twice this evening. It's very annoying if you have just drawn a load of cave... The second time I was editing a line. I tried sending it (wish) a HUP but that just closed it. Not sure what can be done about this apart from saving often, but thought I should report it. Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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Mud and sand
by Andrew Atkinson 17 Dec '04

17 Dec '04

Stacho Mudrak wrote >> >> In any case, soon I will probably add those missing area symbols - >> blocks, snow, ice and mud, but I am afraid, blocks will not look nice. >> But it has to be better than drawing them by hand >> One question, what is the difference between mud and clay? clay = mud >> without water? Should it mean the same, or not? I am not a sedimentologist, but I think that clay is a type of mud, usually of a finer grain. Mud possibly covers silt and sand as well. As a cave surveyor I do not think that I can tell a difference, so would would not particularly want different symbols, but I suspect there are lot of people out there who do. I have tended to use minus signs for mud and dots for sand. But I most probably should be using dots for all of it Andrew Atkinson

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Tom library and scrap connections
by Wookey 16 Dec '04

16 Dec '04

I've got back to Therion after a long period of working all the time. I have a _lot_ of cave to draw up... Current Debian Status: You may recall that I discovered in October that the 0.3.3 version of therion I was building should have had the TOM/OPenGL stuff in it, but didn't. So I've started packaging the Tom library for Debian so that Therion can use it. This is not a trivial job to do properly, and I haven't yet succeeded in building a Debian Therion with 3D support, but expect to in the next couple of weeks. This probably won't quite make it into the imminend debian stable release (but the existing therion 0.3.3-1 is). Connecting scraps: My biggest problem at the moment with Therion is how to split up scraps and connect them nicely. I am drawing over previously-drawn-to-scale scans. given that I want to join scraps at convenient (low detail/logical) places and not the edges of scans, how can I best do this so they match up? I can keep adding background drawings into one file and draw all the scraps that way but I will end up with a huge file that is very slow to load and manipulate, even if I turn off some images which I am not longer directly using. As soon as I start a new file with new background images then I can't see where the old scrap ends so I don't know where to start the new scrap. How do others deal with this problem? How well does therion deal with the lines significantly overlapping, or not reaching each other? Do you always add in the adjoining scan so that you can see what it looked like? This still doesn't really help with remembering how far you drew up to on the last scrap. I feel I am missing something obvious here, as the existing system doesn't seem to work. How is everyone else managing it? How can we make it easier to use? Bugs: I found a couple of bugs, one serious. (using therion 0.3.3-1 on x86) 1) If I have an image (PNM) of size 1672x2333 then only about half of it is visible in the map editor. This makes it impossible to draw round. Is this expected? Should images be limited to some size before they can be importad as background? If so what is that size? 2) if keys used to change mode (F2, F1 etc) then menu top bar disappears.('normalize' window size fixes it). Can anyone else reproduce this Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

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Re: [Fwd: RE: therion]
by Stacho Mudrak 14 Dec '04

14 Dec '04

Andrew Atkinson wrote: >> Well, most of the people find it too difficult :) > > > It does make my head hurt. Therion in the beginning was only experiment and we wanted just to draw a simple map of our complicated 19km cave system. There are a lot of things, that could be designed simplier, but it is too late... :( > PS Any chance of some more fills or control of the density, you can hardly > see the sand and debris fill. (on the attached pdf you can only see the sand > when you zoom in) This is a serious BUG, we have discovered 2 weeks ago. It will be certainly fixed in next release. > Also would it be possible to fill passages with small rocks and medium > rocks. Mud would be useful too. With area we have one problem, that is still not solved. Metapost is not able to tell us, whether specific point lies inside or outside a clipping region. When drawing rocks, it will look terrible, if a rock would be clipped by invisible border in the middle. In any case, soon I will probably add those missing area symbols - blocks, snow, ice and mud, but I am afraid, blocks will not look nice. One question, what is the difference between mud and clay? clay = mud without water? Should it mean the same, or not? > My ideal solution would be to pick an area an then use an option like > -medium_rock 30 -small_rock 50 > and this would mix the 2 fills in these percentages leaving the other 20 > percent (in this case) empty. > While I am on the thought process, I would really like to be able to define > a graded change from say rocks to sand, possibly by putting a straight line > though an area labelling on end -small_rocks 100 and the other end -sand 100 > and the fill would slowly grade. :) Even it looks crazy, this can be a solution. If a rocks, debris, sand or other clastic sediments (mud) would be randomly drawn around a line (like it is done in tunnel). There would be no problem with clipping and it is possible to do also gradient changes (probably...) > Terrible isn't it you spend all your time writing a wonderful program and > all I do is ask for more. All I can say is thanks again, one day I may see > you to buy you a drink. Until now, we were not using areas et all. Our primary target was to have a map, which will be allways up-to-date and there will be all information. For passage fills, we used only point symbols - because those rocks are usually drawn randomly also in the survey notes. Therefore if passage is full of rocks or there is one symbol, that means that passage is full of rocks, it is the same information. The second approach is more easier to implement and read in a map, the first looks nicer (sometimes :) . Fills around the line could solve this problem, but it will definitely need some time. It will not be trivial to implement, and I am currently more focused on 3D modelling, which I am missing much more... Regards, S. P.S. I Cc-ed this message to therion conference, may be some other users will write some useful remarks...

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