Yahoo! CAD module!

Yahoo! I've finally manage to rewrite a module (or actually modify the module) to display the CAD dwg files on QT's widget system. Yupe, after working (even during the holidays) for so long, I manage to display CAD files correctly. Although I'm having some problem with the viewport in order to show the geometries correctly. But after some trial and error (and even reading the OpenGL red book) I've finally manage to put everything back right. Yet, a lot of work still needs to be done. Gambate!

Damn CAD module...

Yeah... It's project time again... A lot happened lately that makes me moody in doing my master project, but no matter what, I need to continue on (maybe the progress will be slow, as now).

Anyway, I'm still working on the CAD module for my project. Export my medical model doesn't seems to got problem, although got some slight slowness due to one of the process during export. Anyhow, I'm having problem to import CAD files into my application, or to be exact, I can't get the CAD files to show in my Qt Widget GUI.

Well, I'm using Trolltech's QT (http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt) GUI library to handle my GUI components. To be honest, at first I was quite scare in using Qt (Afterall, it's not quite widely used for windows applications) Anyway, after reading tutorials, documentation (yeah, their documentation is good) and example, I found myself working comfortably with Qt. In fact, my DICOM module was build entirely atop qt framework (but it's not Qt's plugin). On the other hand, since CAD module will be difficult, I had to join Open Design Alliance (http://www.opendesign.com/) in order to use their CAD library. Their modules (DirectDWG) are good, providing some simplicity for applications to read/write CAD files. However, since DirectDWG does not natively support Qt in vectorization process (process of showing CAD files graphically), I'm on my own to write custome modules.

So far, I manage to do some extra work to somehow use OpenGL to draw the CAD objects on QtGLWidget. Well, although the end result seems nice, but it doesn't fully ultilise the DirectDWG vectorization framework. Hmm... I manage to think some new ideas to try out, and if those can't work, then I think I'll had to stick with the useful ones.

Project Status

Hmm... after working so hard for the few previous week, I decided to unroll more about my project.

Yupe, it's nothing much since it's not a new method or new ideas, just a couple of old technologies combine together.

Yupe, it's just a dicom file viewer, packed with simple 3d surface reconstruction, and *perhaps* some CAD operations as well.

By the time of writing, I'm almost 50% into the whole project, with each module's progress as following~
DICOM 100%
3D 50%
CAD 0%

There's still a lot more to deal with, since I've change some basic structure of my application (just to overcome some stupid bug) But so far, most of the important features are covered, and hopefully, I can complete it by end of this year.

Frustrated...

Ah... who can help me... Frustrated to see that damn problem in my project...

The dicom module, which was suppose to read dicom images, was acting kinda strangely enough.

 

Since my actual data taken from hospital was slightly large (>10mb per image), I usually use dummy data fetch from the internet for testing and debug purpose. The test data seems fine enough, and I've manage to display the image (including a *sort of* 3D reconstruction object)

 

The odd thing is, of 2 sets of real data that I obtained, 1 of them is unabled to show up perfectly. Checking here and there confirms that the I've extract the image data perfectly from dicom, and I even found someway to improve the performance as well. But just for some reason it just dun wanna display correctly on screen (showing up jagged image)

 

So, I turn to check the display functions. Changing from OpenGL functions back to GDI functions (since it's 2D), I check, try to manipulate the data a bit here and there, but yet the result is the same... Haii... for a week, I've keep seeing the same coding again and again.... all with no vain...

 

Untill...

 

I was playing around the variables around my display functions. I exchanged the image's witdh and image height. Binbong! It display nicely! Omg... A quick check shows that I've mistakenly decode the image's width and height wrongly.... What about the test data that seems ok? It's because for those data, their image width and height is the same (which makes no difference if they're swapped)

 

Dunno what to say... Just wanna hang myself for frustrated because of just 2 variables...