Is the pain of trying to get heightmaps working worth it?
I've spent the last day and a half trying to get height maps working in gazebo 11 but with no end of grief.
It seems to crash for a lot of unknown reasons, but working backward from a built-in example, I'm able to get the simulator to at least load a heightmap static building/model. However once it's loaded the simulation just hangs, or hangs then crashes with no output (even with --verbose).
My texture is 257x257 so shouldn't be too big, I don't think.
It does not appear to work whether or not gzclient is working.
What I really want to know is if I'm wasting my time. Are heightmaps a known problem area for Gazebo that is a lost cause, or is it more likely that there's a minor issue that is easy to fix.
I'd consider testing the waters with ign-gazebo, but it apparently doesn't support hightmaps or polylines yet, and one of those two seems necessary since the building editor is practically unusable without undo.
Could you share a minimal example of how to reproduce the issue?
Gave up. Sunk too much time and can't afford the time to produce minimal example. But one issue appears to have been my B&W image was encoded as RGB. Switching to 8bit single channel got it at least to show up, but once it did it just hangs. After spawning the model far away from the surface without hang, it appears to be a performance problem as the system slows a halt on approach. Error and warning messages could have saved days of work. Stl meshes seem to be performant. Using those now.