Setting up help

[sayan]

Hey fellas

So recently my research lab wanted me to use sofa for generating simulations but I am getting very confused. So I have downloaded sofa binaries, qt creater, boost, vs2015, cmake gui. After downloading what are my next steps. I want to know how to combine all theses download in windows and actually try to create a robot simulation.
If someone can help me out I would be more than grateful

[JieYing]

Hi sayan,

You should be able to just run the sofa binaries and then you should get an executable runSofa that you can launch and start playing with the examples. The other ones are necessary for building from source code, but if you don’t need all the features, the binary files should be sufficient.

Jie Ying

[sayan]

Hey

Yeah I did runsofa and saw the different examples like the snake and liver stuff. But can you tell me how do I start something from scratch. For example I have to simulate a crawling robot for which I need to design the crawling robot. My question is where exactly I do that

[JieYing]

So if you add runSofa on your windows environment path, you can then call it from cmd line with your own scene, ex. runSofa <filepath>.scn.

[Hugo]

Hi @sayan957

And thanks for the (very) reactive support @jieying!
Once SOFA is installed, you will need to write your own scene file *.scn (in XML) or *.py (in Python). You can find plenty examples of simulation scenes in examples/Components/
If you are looking at building SoftRobotics simulations, I guess examples are also available in the SoftRobot plugin.

Best wishes,

Hugo

[sayan]

Hey
So this is the part wher I get confused. How to put runsofa in windows environment path?
Also using the command runSofa <filepath>.scn. allows me to create my own simulation and scenes?

Sorry for disturbing but I just need to get a hang of this whole thing.
Thanx in advance

[JieYing]

Try https://www.architectryan.com/2018/03/17/add-to-the-path-on-windows-10/. If you’re not sure what your SOFA path is, you can find where you installed it by right-clicking on the shortcut you’ve been opening runSofa from, and open file location.

[Hugo]

Hi @sayan957

If you compiled the sources of SOFA, you can add the path to the bin/ repository of SOFA in your environment variable. Here is an article describing how to proceed.

If you installed the binary, you had an option to cross in order to set this SOFA environment variable. If you did not cross it, follow the instructions given in the above link.

The simulation scenes (*.scn) can be loaded directly from runSofa with: CTRL+O
To design a scene file, you can get inspired from the existing examples in examples/Components/
Unfortunately, today no Modeler is available to assist in the design of a scene, but you can also give a look at the examples/Tutorials/StepbyStep/

Best

Hugo

[Author]

Posts