A bit of a misnomer, this is a partial update to the (not yet released) Drake v0.39.0, covering upstream changes to VTK. In short, Drake updated to VTK 9, but Director is stuck on VTK 8 (and unlikely to ever be updated). This caused issues with our use of Director, which brings in Pydrake for things like visualizing kinematics. The solution, from Jeremy Nimmer at TRI, is to
Bring in a precompiled version of Pydrake as a dependency for our Director, replacing the local version. This fixes the VTK linking issues, seeming to allow both to live side-by-side.
This has the unfortunate side effect where our Director cannot depend on any of our C++ bindings (pydairlib). There was only one such use in our code, which I removed.
In fixing the above comment, the VisualizaitonGui.py script requires Director to be run from the base dairlib/ directory. This could be fixed, but didn't seem worth the effort at the moment.
Currently, the precompiled Pydrake version is hosted locally (on my webspace), until an official Drake 0.39.0 wheel is released.
I tried to add a unit test for Director, but unfortunately it requires an X screen to run, and so fails in CI.
A bit of a misnomer, this is a partial update to the (not yet released) Drake v0.39.0, covering upstream changes to VTK. In short, Drake updated to VTK 9, but Director is stuck on VTK 8 (and unlikely to ever be updated). This caused issues with our use of Director, which brings in Pydrake for things like visualizing kinematics. The solution, from Jeremy Nimmer at TRI, is to
dairlib/directory. This could be fixed, but didn't seem worth the effort at the moment.This change is