[Proposal] Stabilize `_spawn_mesh_geom_from_mesh`

[TCA166]

Proposal

I would like for the _spawn_mesh_geom_from_mesh function to become a stable, documented and public part of the library.

Motivation

I am trying to implement a way to spawn procedurally generated objects into a scene, meaning creating USD files is a bit of a hassle. While looking through the source I found this awesome function _spawn_mesh_geom_from_mesh, however it's very hidden and marked as private. Why is that?

Alternatives

Honestly any sort of interface for spawning things that aren't inside of a file would be great.

Additional context

Checklist

• [x] I have checked that there is no similar issue in the repo (required)

Acceptance Criteria

[RandomOakForest]

Thanks for posting this proposal. Have you looked at domain randomization? Would this be something that'd help?

[TCA166]

Thank you for responding! No I haven't looked into domain randomization, it certainly will come in useful later down the line so thank you for pointing me in that direction, but I can't see the relevance of it in regards to spawning procedurally generated meshes. The workflow we have currently looks something like this:

@dataclass
class DynamicMesh(AssetMesh):

    mesh: Trimesh

    def to_cfg(self) -> SpawnerCfg:
        def func_wrapper(prim: str, cfg: MeshCfg, *args, **kwargs):
            return _spawn_mesh_geom_from_mesh(
                prim, cfg, self.mesh, *args, **kwargs
            )

        return MeshCfg(func=func_wrapper)

which is then used to create AssetBaseCfg instances. It works great right now, but we are rather obviously afraid that some change later down the line will break it.

[TCA166]

Just in case anyone else stumbles upon a similar issue; we eventually found create_prim_from_mesh call in isaaclab.terrains.utils which does a similar thing. It isn't marked as private, nor does it use a shitty approximate collider mesh, so I think this proposal is moot and you should just use that call. The snippet in my previous comment now looks like this:

def to_cfg(self) -> SpawnerCfg:
        logger.debug("Creating dynamic mesh cfg")

        def func_wrapper(prim: str, cfg: SpawnerCfg, *args, **kwargs):
            create_prim_from_mesh(
                prim,
                self.mesh,
                # visual_material=cfg.visual_material,
                # physics_material=cfg.physics_material,
                *args,
                **kwargs,
            )
            p = prim_utils.get_prim_at_path(prim)
            if cfg.semantic_tags is not None:
                for tag, value in cfg.semantic_tags:
                    apply_semantics(p, tag, value)
            return p

        return SpawnerCfg(func=func_wrapper)