Hey folks!!

We have come to the end of the first stage of GSoC project, the Community Bonding Period. Official coding begins NOW!!

I spent my Community Bonding Period very well. I got a very good exposure to the project and this helped me a lot in understanding the work and starting off correctly. I got introduced to vtk, GLSL language and obviously the vtk library of Python and how to communicate between them.

I had a Video Chat with Elef, Ranveer, David, and Gabriel on 8th May. The talk was very smooth and I got myself familiar with their expectations of this project. They are very much interested in improving the visualization module of dipy which I also think is the need of the hour. We discussed the importance of Shaders and its relevance in this field of study.

As a part of the Community Bonding Period, I worked on the following tasks to gain more insight into the project.

  1. Experimenting with the vtk-shaders code. This was the initial code developed and maintained by David. I went ahead and made several modifications to the given code to obtain interesting shapes. I understood the structure of the code and different aspects of using a Python wrapper around python vtk.

  2. Understood the basic functioning of Streamlines. The strategies used to perform various operations on the graph input.

  3. Spherical Harmonics are used for the visualization of spheres. I tried out experimenting with that and now I would be spending some more time trying to figure out the Spherical Harmonics and the use it has to produce visualizations of the datasets.

With an important part of the project ending soon, I am very much excited to get into the Coding Period of the program and look forward to having great fun ahead. In the next few days, I’ll be again having a Video chat with Elef and my mentors regarding future works that need to be done.

Looking forward to more exciting times.

thechargedneutron