Use this mechanism to improve the visual appearance of your meshes. Tip: Collada and OBJ file formats allow you to attach materials to the meshes. This will make placement of the model in Gazebo significantly easier.
#SKETCHUP MAKE A SPHERE SOFTWARE#
Tip: Use your 3D modeling software to move each mesh so that it is centered on the origin. Gazebo requires that mesh files be formatted as STL, Collada or OBJ, with Collada and OBJ being the preferred formats. Finally, you can make your own meshes using a 3D modeler such as Blender or Sketchup. Alternatively, you may already have the necessary files. Google's 3D warehouse is a good repository of 3D models. If your model needs something more complex, then continue reading. Gazebo provides a set of simple shapes: box, sphere, and cylinder. This step involves gathering all the necessary 3D mesh files that are required to build your model. Building a Model Step 1: Collect your meshes Plugins: A plugin is a shared library created by a third party to control a model. A parent and child relationship is established along with other parameters such as axis of rotation, and joint limits. Light: A light element describes a light source attached to a link. Sensor: A sensor collects data from the world for use in plugins. Inertial: The inertial element describes the dynamic properties of the link, such as mass and rotational inertia matrix. A link may contain 0 or more visual elements.
Visual: A visual element is used to visualize parts of a link. A link may contain many collision elements. This can be a simple shape (which is preferred), or a triangle mesh (which consumes greater resources). Instead, create the table with 1 link and 5 collision elements.Ĭollision: A collision element encapsulates a geometry that is used for collision checking. However, this is overly complex, especially since the joints will never move. For example, a table model could consist of 5 links (4 for the legs and 1 for the top) connected via joints. Try to reduce the number of links in your models in order to improve performance and stability. Each link may contain many collision and visual elements. This can be a wheel, or a link in a joint chain. Links: A link contains the physical properties of one body of the model.
#SKETCHUP MAKE A SPHERE HOW TO#
This page will offer some tips on how to build your models. Generating a model file can be difficult depending on the complexity of the desired model. It refers to the SDF tag, and is essentially a collection of links, joints, collision objects, visuals, and plugins. SDF Models can range from simple shapes to complex robots. This tutorial describes the details of a SDF Model Object.