clalancette
commented
2 years ago I took a bit of a look at what was going on here today.
First of all, I was able to reproduce the problem very easily, even on Rolling and even building from source. As the error message says, the problem is that tif (or tiff) files aren't currently supported by rviz_ogre_vendor. The obvious workaround is to change the tif files in urdf_tutorial to another file format that we can successfully load.
But that is a bit unsatisfying; it would be nice to support tif files.
So I took a deeper look. What happens when Ogre starts up is that it has plugins for handling various file image types. One of those plugins is for freeimage, and one of the plugins is for STBI. freeimage is the well-known open-source library, and does seem to support tif files. STBI seems to be a relatively simple image library with support for various image file formats, but not for tif. Crucially, STBI is bundled into the Ogre sources, while freeimage is only found via an external library. So at build time, if freeimage is found, then Ogre builds the freeimage plugin. STBI is always in the sources so it is always built.
And this leads us to the first problem. Our rviz_ogre_vendor [package.xml]() file does not declare a dependency on freeimage. What that means is that when we are building the packages on the buildfarm, it does not have access to freeimage (since we only install packages in the package.xml). This in turn means that the packages don't have support for freeimage, and thus will never support tif.
That said, we should be able to workaround this locally by installing libfreeimage-dev ourselves, and then building the package. Indeed, doing that we can see that the build does indeed build the freeimage plugin. However, for reasons I don't yet understand, it still does not use freeimage and still falls back to the STBI library.
That is the next thing to investigate here; once we figure out how Ogre chooses between the libraries, we should be able to (hopefully) make it use freeimage and get tif support.
xlla
On a clean apt package install of galactic on Ubuntu 20.04.3, it seems that Ogre has been compiled without TIF support:
This error shows up when trying to run the official URDF tutorial: http://docs.ros.org/en/galactic/Tutorials/URDF/Building-a-Visual-Robot-Model-with-URDF-from-Scratch.html#finishing-the-model due to the finger meshes. Specifically when running
urdf_tutorial is a fresh checkout of https://github.com/ros/urdf_tutorial/tree/ros2 on ros2 branch, i.e. f8a1bf7f01c61bdbfc9a1cd25f7dda3843af0a0d.