hj412fr@duc220.uni-duisburg.de (Martin Anantharaman) (12/06/90)
Could someone report on his experience with the Intelligent Light, Inc. products (3DV/ CADimator/Framestore-32/Paint/IVIEW/IVIEW Dore/VIDEOTOOLS)? Apart from the general impression you may have got, I am particularly interested in the following aspects: 1) How do the 3DV/IVIEW/Dore suite compare to the official Apollo GMR3D/PHIGS products (with which we are not altogether happy) in ease-of-use and performance, 2) How easy is it to go from some data-description (generated by hand or extracted from a CAD package) to a ray-traced animation on VIDEO with the various modules? 3) Does someone know of a European contact, or have a FAX address of the company? 4) Are there other products (third-party or official) for this kind of visualization application (available now or in the near future) that I should be looking at? Thanks in advance, Martin Anantharaman FB7, FG7 (Mechanik) Work: +49 (203) 379-3336 Universitaet -GH- Duisburg Home: +49 (203) 37 65 89 Lotharstr. 1 FAX: +49 (203) 379-3052 4100 Duisburg 1 E-Mail: hj412fr@duc220.uni-duisburg.de West Germany
lipman@dtrc.dt.navy.mil (Lipman) (12/12/90)
I have some experience in using Intelligent Light products. Our application was visualizing finite element analysis results that were computed on a Cray. The results were downloaded to the Apollo, converted to IL files and frames were rendered to dump to videotape. The products we were using was call GVIEW which I think is now call 3DV. In any case based on my experience (which was about 2-3 years ago) and having talked to other more recent IL users, it is not well suited for scientific visualization. It might be OK for doing what I call 'Hollywood type' animations. The kind of stuff you see on TV. It is not user-friendly and is not good for an engineer or student with limited time. Specifically, IL's basic data format is too restrictive and requires the user to do a lot of processing to get the data into IL's format. The product I used was absolutely not user-friendly, not fast, and not very interactive. I suspect the current animation product is a little better. I saw it at SIGGRAPH this year but the data format is still the same. It took at least 1-2 weeks to interface NASTRAN finite element analysis results to IL's data format. It then took another 1-2 weeks to setup the animation. The animation was of a structure vibrating with color contours changing as the structure vibrated and was rotated. We eventually made a 90 second videotape of the vibrations. We also have IL's Dore, however we never have used it. We have never had the opportunity to use it or compare it with GMR3D or PHIGS. IL was very accomidating to us. They gave us training for 3 people for a week, let us use the software for several months, dumped all the rendered frames to videotape, all at no cost. We still have not bought anything from them. I think they have a distributor in Milan, Italy. Their US phone number is 201-794-7550. There is another product that we use call FOTO from a company name Cognivision. FOTO is a highly interactive, use-friendly, and easy to interface to data visualization package. I interfaced our NASTRAN finite element analysis results in less than a day and created animations in about half an hour. It is great to visualize finite element analysis results. Their data format is basically polygonal. We are very happy with the package. For more info about FOTO: Cognivision, Inc. 319 Littleton Road, Suite 100 Westford, MA 01886 (508)-392-0881, FAX (508)-392-0882 There are only 2 employees, Mark Smith and Olin Lathrop. Olin was one of the developers of the DN10K. Hope this is helpful, Bob Lipman Disclaimer: These are my opinions and nobody else's.