bpm@psuecl.bitnet (Brian Moquin) (12/03/89)
Questions: . Does anyone have experience with a package called Doray? (I think it is a graphics library; I know it is for the Ardent-Titan.) . Does anyone know about a package called AVS? What can it do? . Are there any good books on X Windows on the market? Thanks in advance, b
klg@dukeac.UUCP (Kim Greer) (12/04/89)
In article <69515@psuecl.bitnet> bpm@psuecl.bitnet (Brian Moquin) writes: >Questions: > >. Does anyone have experience with a package called Doray? (I think it >is a graphics library; I know it is for the Ardent-Titan.) > I think the spelling is Dore' ... don't have any details on it >. Does anyone know about a package called AVS? What can it do? > We run AVS (Application Visulization System) here on our Stellar (now Stardent (Stellar and Ardent are now one company)) computers. From the brochure: "An interactive application for real-time data dsplay with features previously available only with expensive animation software. A mechanism for integrating simulation and analysis code into an interactive graphics environment." " ...AVS is free - an integral capability of every Stellar [sic] Graphics Supercomputer." You get a working executable and the sources as well. It is based on PHIGS+ and X11. You can customize your own applications if the shipped version does not do what you want. What does it do? 3-D real time manipulation of single or multiple objects various shadings/rendering (wire, Gouraud, Phong, etc) various shadings/rendering (wire, Gouraud, Phong, etc) Object menu - read and save objects, set visibility on/off, select rendering modes Transforms - manipulation of Objects, Lights or Camera by mouse, control dials or Spaceball Surface Properties Editor - read and save properties, select RGB, or HSV color values, ambient, diffuse and specular reflectivity, transparency Lights menu - select type, number (up to 16 independent), position, color Action menu - cycle or step through a sequence of databases Camera menu - create, read and save scenes, select viewing options and backgrounds File browser menu - read indata files, scenes or surface properties from anywhere in the file system We use it for displaying spect (single photon emission ct) scan data of cardiac studies. These may be gated or non-gated (AVS will display either). FYI - "gated" means that we break the cardiac cycle into a number of "frames" and repetively add them over X number of beats. This means that we have the ability to display one (or all) slice levels through the heart in a real-time display. So we have the XYZ spatial information, the intensity for any pixel in that XYZ and then the time domain info. It takes a little bit of disk space for one study, as you might imagine. These studies are done with either Tc99m labelled red blood cells or with Tc99m Cardiolite. The rbc's show the vessel interior volume. Cardiolite show the myocardium itself, rather than the contents like the rbc's. We haven't done any gated Thallium-201 scans yet, though plenty of non-gated ones. One member (Mark Smith) of our group has been concentrating on the "3-D display" of cardiac data. He had to spend very little time converting the data to a form that AVS wanted. The big time now is spent writing algorithms with enough intelligence to do what we (people) do sort of automatically - pick out the edges of interest, ignore the insignificant objects, etc. AVS is obviously not limited to medical stuff. There are demos with mathamatical objects and molecules (that can wiggle/vibrate). I'm not positive, but I think that the stock AVS will do stereo images, provided you have the stereo monitor and view-glasses. Other demo programs are supplied, most with sources, for generating robots and stuff like that. Hope this helps. Kim L. Greer Duke University Medical Center try: klg@orion.mc.duke.edu Div. Nuclear Medicine POB 3949 ...!mcnc!ecsgate!dukeac!klg Durham, NC 27710 919-681-2711x223 fax: 919-681-5636
rick@hanauma.stanford.edu (Richard Ottolini) (12/05/89)
Dore (Doray) is a procedural 3-D graphics system, like PHIGS+, but better. Alas, although the source code is almost free ($250 from Ardent), it only runs fast on Ardent Titans. I prefer Dore over PHIGS and Silicon Graphics gl when doing visulaization research and results don't need to be portable.