Has anyone done any work on the task of converting existing Tunnel sketches (xml) to therion .th2 files? CUCC (Cambridge Loser expeditions: https://expo.survex.com) has a huge investment of tunnel drawings (55km of cave?), but because there are no elevations for any of this and Tunnel is a bit niche we are pondering using therion more. If a semi-automated conversion of the existing drawings was possible, that would help enormously. It seems like it shouldn't fundamentally be too hard to turn xml lines/beziers into therion lines/beziers, and map the line types, but there are issues with how to allocate lines to files and how to get the scaling right. I've not done anything at all about it yet, but thought I'd check if anyone else had before having a proper look. Thoughts? Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
Not strictly tunnel to therion, but I've tried XML to therion. The bit that flawed me and others was the lack of explicit direction of lines, which for therion is important but not for most other software. It appeared that drawing again would be about the same work as giving direction to the lines. Not surprisingly this is a project of mine that is still awaiting a solution. Andrew -- Sent with K-9 Mail On 29 June 2022 17:34:35 BST, Wookey <wookey@wookware.org> wrote:
Has anyone done any work on the task of converting existing Tunnel sketches (xml) to therion .th2 files?
CUCC (Cambridge Loser expeditions: https://expo.survex.com) has a huge investment of tunnel drawings (55km of cave?), but because there are no elevations for any of this and Tunnel is a bit niche we are pondering using therion more.
If a semi-automated conversion of the existing drawings was possible, that would help enormously.
It seems like it shouldn't fundamentally be too hard to turn xml lines/beziers into therion lines/beziers, and map the line types, but there are issues with how to allocate lines to files and how to get the scaling right.
I've not done anything at all about it yet, but thought I'd check if anyone else had before having a proper look.
Thoughts?
Wookey
Wookey, The TunnelX program already has an SVG exporter that exports splines with the right control points here: https://github.com/CaveSurveying/tunnelx/blob/master/src/SvgGraphics2D.java#... This would save a lot of effort re-implementing a TunnelX file parser when it's got one already, so it's just a matter of looping through the geometry and writing it to a .th file in the format you want. We could also use the TunnelX subsets (currently used for colouring) as the basis for blasting apart single directly editable Sketch files into hundreds of little Scrap files of non-overlapping passageways by exporting the geometry assigned to each subset tag to a file of the same name. If there are enough young folk on expo who are raring to do it all in Therion, send them to me and we can write and debug these exporters together. I won't do it on my own because Therion is too hard for me to operate. As you know, I've moved far beyond this 2D cave representation business, which I now believe is fundamentally obsolete in the era of cheap lidar scans and GPUs built into every phone. There's a short little demo here, which shows how elevations could actually work on a phone (since no fixed 2D view can ever be adequate): https://youtu.be/zIQAslYa_HA?t=43 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIQAslYa_HA> and you can download copies direct to your Quest2 VR headset here: https://sidequestvr.com/app/1630/tunnelvr Once you start working in 3D you begin to realize just how spectacularly little is conveyed in these 2D drawings, for all their visible complexity and clutter. I've put together a talk at the UIS conference about it and will bring demo equipment. Julian. On Wed, 29 Jun 2022 at 18:10, Wookey <wookey@wookware.org> wrote:
Has anyone done any work on the task of converting existing Tunnel sketches (xml) to therion .th2 files?
CUCC (Cambridge Loser expeditions: https://expo.survex.com) has a huge investment of tunnel drawings (55km of cave?), but because there are no elevations for any of this and Tunnel is a bit niche we are pondering using therion more.
If a semi-automated conversion of the existing drawings was possible, that would help enormously.
It seems like it shouldn't fundamentally be too hard to turn xml lines/beziers into therion lines/beziers, and map the line types, but there are issues with how to allocate lines to files and how to get the scaling right.
I've not done anything at all about it yet, but thought I'd check if anyone else had before having a proper look.
Thoughts?
Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/ _______________________________________________ Therion mailing list Therion@speleo.sk https://mailman.speleo.sk/listinfo/therion
I did this for some of my Matienzo surveys which I originally started drawing in Tunnel before I moved to Therion when the process of morphing old drawings onto new data became too time consuming as the project got larger. The approach I took was to export the drawings from Tunnel as SVG, then process these in Inkscape and save to Therion format using the Therion Inkscape plug-in. The main pitfall I found was that the 'click to place line points' method of drawing splines in Tunnel had led to much denser points per line than typically is the case when drawing in Therion with the 'click and drag out handles' method with bezier curves. I found I tended to get many short line fragments from the conversion, and tiny line fragments overlapping themselves or hidden under other lines. Cleaning these up was time consuming, and I eventually concluded I would get better drawings by using bitmaps of my Tunnel drawings as background sketches in Therion and redrawing them in Therion. Like many big survey projects where nobody else seems interested in getting involved beyond the actual caving trips it all proved too much work for me alone and after 10 years my enthusiasm waned, so much remains to be drawn up still. Footleg On Wed, Jun 29, 2022 at 6:10 PM Wookey <wookey@wookware.org> wrote:
Has anyone done any work on the task of converting existing Tunnel sketches (xml) to therion .th2 files?
CUCC (Cambridge Loser expeditions: https://expo.survex.com) has a huge investment of tunnel drawings (55km of cave?), but because there are no elevations for any of this and Tunnel is a bit niche we are pondering using therion more.
If a semi-automated conversion of the existing drawings was possible, that would help enormously.
It seems like it shouldn't fundamentally be too hard to turn xml lines/beziers into therion lines/beziers, and map the line types, but there are issues with how to allocate lines to files and how to get the scaling right.
I've not done anything at all about it yet, but thought I'd check if anyone else had before having a proper look.
Thoughts?
Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/ _______________________________________________ Therion mailing list Therion@speleo.sk https://mailman.speleo.sk/listinfo/therion
So, two things here. The morphing of old drawings to new data could have been automated if the process of sub-selecting from the whole survex dataset could be formalized. Only by survex processing the whole cave system and then snipping out the cave section you want, instead of compiling from some sub-directory, can you get the legs into their real world positions with the final loop closures applied. Secondly, the bezier lines output by tunnelx will be accurate and should work for Therion. If the segments are too short and annoying, I could write a script that takes in a valid therion file, combines them into longer pieces and outputs them as longer combined splines. This script could at least be used for other purposes and would be easier to debug as you wouldn't need TunnelX to preview the input and output. But the main issue is -- as Mad Phil has pointed out -- by the time we do all this and pester one and a half people to train themselves and be interested in ploughing through all this work to eventually produce an output after a number of years that's pretty much the same as what you have already, the era of cheap lidar scans and handy intuitive 3D representations will be upon us. So this is a bit like investing time into a new revised edition of the London A-Z Streetmap booklet just as google maps and OSMand are coming out on these new-fangled smartphone thingies that are never going to catch on. Meantime, I've been practicing the talk I'm giving at the UIS2021 conference in France this month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOktKq0c7BY Julian. On Thu, 30 Jun 2022 at 12:03, Footleg <drfootleg@gmail.com> wrote:
I did this for some of my Matienzo surveys which I originally started drawing in Tunnel before I moved to Therion when the process of morphing old drawings onto new data became too time consuming as the project got larger. The approach I took was to export the drawings from Tunnel as SVG, then process these in Inkscape and save to Therion format using the Therion Inkscape plug-in. The main pitfall I found was that the 'click to place line points' method of drawing splines in Tunnel had led to much denser points per line than typically is the case when drawing in Therion with the 'click and drag out handles' method with bezier curves. I found I tended to get many short line fragments from the conversion, and tiny line fragments overlapping themselves or hidden under other lines. Cleaning these up was time consuming, and I eventually concluded I would get better drawings by using bitmaps of my Tunnel drawings as background sketches in Therion and redrawing them in Therion. Like many big survey projects where nobody else seems interested in getting involved beyond the actual caving trips it all proved too much work for me alone and after 10 years my enthusiasm waned, so much remains to be drawn up still.
Footleg
On Wed, Jun 29, 2022 at 6:10 PM Wookey <wookey@wookware.org> wrote:
Has anyone done any work on the task of converting existing Tunnel sketches (xml) to therion .th2 files?
CUCC (Cambridge Loser expeditions: https://expo.survex.com) has a huge investment of tunnel drawings (55km of cave?), but because there are no elevations for any of this and Tunnel is a bit niche we are pondering using therion more.
If a semi-automated conversion of the existing drawings was possible, that would help enormously.
It seems like it shouldn't fundamentally be too hard to turn xml lines/beziers into therion lines/beziers, and map the line types, but there are issues with how to allocate lines to files and how to get the scaling right.
I've not done anything at all about it yet, but thought I'd check if anyone else had before having a proper look.
Thoughts?
Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/ _______________________________________________ Therion mailing list Therion@speleo.sk https://mailman.speleo.sk/listinfo/therion
_______________________________________________ Therion mailing list Therion@speleo.sk https://mailman.speleo.sk/listinfo/therion
participants (4)
-
Andrew Atkinson -
Footleg -
Julian Todd -
Wookey