rviz doesn't show any shape

Question

Hi all, I'm trying to build my first URDF model, following this tutorial: http://wiki.ros.org/urdf/Tutorials/Building%20a%20Visual%20Robot%20Model%20with%20URDF%20from%20Scratch

Booth replicating what's done there, and cloning this repo too, I can't see any mash or shape in rviz, only transformations; here's what I see from chap.4 code:

image description http://imageshack.com/a/img924/7439/FGZxFt.jpg

There should be cylinders and squares...

Anyone experiencing this issue? I'm running ROS Lunar, Ubuntu 17.04 x64 on VirtualBox (with "3D acceleration" disabled because i don't know why, if it's enabled rviz trows segmentation faults at start)

Side note: chap.1 I think it's buggy because with no joints there's not any "base_link" transformation supplied by joint_state_publisher, and Rviz go crazy...

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Originally posted by Maik993 on ROS Answers with karma: 1 on 2017-09-22

Post score: 0

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Original comments

Comment by gvdhoorn on 2017-09-23:
We're probably going to have to see what the contents of your URDF is.

Comment by Maik993 on 2017-09-24:
I went further and complete the model, the result is an exact copy of this. In rviz I still don't see any shape, but launching the same file in Gazebo produce a correct visualisation of the entire robot.

Comment by gvdhoorn on 2017-11-20:
This could be caused by locale settings. See ros-visualization/rviz#1151.

Answer 1

This is likely a problem with RViz/VirtualBox, and not your URDF.

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Originally posted by David Lu with karma: 10932 on 2017-09-25

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

Answer 2

Highlighting @gvdhoorn's previous suggestion (for others that come across this issue) that the issue may be related to locales.

Some rviz users have encountered a similar issue on newer ubuntu/debian versions e.g. ROS Lunar on Ubuntu Artful or ROS Melodic on Ubuntu Bionic (see for example: https://github.com/ros-visualization/rviz/issues/1249).

If that's the underlying issue, modifying the following environment variable will fix it:

export LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8".

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Originally posted by dhood with karma: 621 on 2018-07-09

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 4

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Original comments

Comment by PouceHeure on 2019-10-17:
Thanks !! It works, your fix allowed me to use turtlebot3_fake package and display the robot.