Week 4 Blogpost

docs/source/posts/2023/2023-06-26-week-4-joaodellagli.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
+Week 4: Nothing is Ever Lost
+============================
+
+.. post:: June 26, 2023
+   :author: João Victor Dell Agli Floriano
+   :tags: google
+   :category: gsoc
+
+
+Welcome again to another weekly blogpost! Today, let's talk about the importance of guidance throughout a project.
+
+Last Week's Effort
+-----------------------
+So, last week my project was struggling with some supposedly simple in concept, yet intricate in execution issues. If you recall from
+my :doc:`last blogpost <2023-06-19-week-3-joaodellagli>`, I could not manage to make the Framebuffer Object setup work, as its method, 
+``SetContext()``, wasn't being able to generate the FBO inside OpenGL. Well, after some (more) research about that as I also dived in my 
+plan B, that involved studying numba as a way to accelerate a data structure I implemented on my PR `#783 <https://github.com/fury-gl/fury/pull/783>`_, 
+me and one of my mentors decided we needed a pair programming session, that finally happened on thursday. After that session, 
+we could finally understand what was going on. 
+
+Where the Problem Was
+---------------------
+Apparently, for the FBO generation to work, it is first needed to initialize the context interactor:
+
+::
+
+   FBO = vtk.vtkOpenGLFramebufferObject()
+
+   manager.window.SetOffScreenRendering(True) # so the window doesn't show up, but important for later as well
+   manager.initialize() # missing part that made everything work
+
+   FBO.SetContext(manager.window) # Sets the context for the FBO. Finally, it works
+   FBO.PopulateFramebuffer(width, height, True, 1, vtk.VTK_UNSIGNED_CHAR, False, 24, 0) # And now I could populate the FBO with textures 
+
+
+This simple missing line of code was responsible for ending weeks of suffer, as after that, I called:
+::
+   print("FBO of index:", FBO.GetFBOIndex()) 
+   print("Number of color attachments:", FBO.GetNumberOfColorAttachments())
+
+That outputted: 
+::
+   FBO of index: 4
+   Number of color attachments: 1
+
+That means the FBO generation was successful! One explanation that seems reasonable to me on why was that happening is that, as it was 
+not initialized, the context was being passed ``null`` to the ``SetContext()`` method, that returned without any warning of what was happening.
+
+Here, I would like to point out how my mentor was **essential** to this solution to come: I had struggled for some time with that, and could 
+not find a way out, but a single session of synchronous pair programming where I could expose clearly my problem and talk to someone 
+way more experienced than I, someone designated for that, was my way out of this torment, so value your mentors! Thanks Bruno!
+
+
+This Week's Goals
+-----------------
+Now, with the FBO working, I plan to finally *render* something to it. For this week, I plan to come back to my original plan and
+experiment with simple shaders just as a proof of concept that the FBO will be really useful for this project. I hope the road is less
+bumpier by now and I don't step on any other complicated problem. 
+
+Wish me luck!