ianh@merlin.bhpmrl.oz (Ian Hoyle) (02/22/90)
At last I'm finally going to get my very own 240 GTX to do some volume
visualization work and more general stuff. I have already asked this group
about ChapVolumes vs VoxelView comparisons (thanx v. much for the replies
people :-), but would now like to pose another question.
Having just read through Stardent's glossy blurb on their AVS (Application
Visualization System),
a) has anyone ported this to an SGI machine (probably GTX architecture) since
source code licences are available
b) does SGI have any plans to provide such a higher level visualization tool
for users ??? I should think such an application would be ** very ** well
received.
ian
--
Ian Hoyle
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Internet: ianh%merlin.bhpmrl.oz.au@uunet.uu.netjim@baroque.Stanford.EDU (James Helman) (02/22/90)
From what I've seen AVS looks like a prototype, albeit a good one, of what a visualization environment should be. It will be quite some time before AVS or its successors actually have enough capabilities to match custom, application specific, scientific visualization software. But for a general purpose tool, it's not bad. At a recent demostration at Stardent, they indicated that AVS is being ported to Dore for use on the Ardent Titan machines. The port involves the writing of a graphics independent level, which should make it easier to port to other architectures. I too would like to see AVS on our 4D machines. When or whether it will happen is anybody's guess. Even Stardent and SGI may not know yet. Also, the problem with porting prototypes is that the original may be changing so fast that the porters can't keep up. Jim Helman Department of Applied Physics P.O. Box 10494 Stanford University Stanford, CA 94309 (jim@thrush.stanford.edu) (415) 723-4940
sgf@cs.brown.edu (Sam Fulcomer) (02/22/90)
In article <1423@merlin.bhpmrl.oz> ianh@merlin.bhpmrl.oz (Ian Hoyle) writes: >At last I'm finally going to get my very own 240 GTX to do some volume >visualization work and more general stuff. I have already asked this group >Having just read through Stardent's glossy blurb on their AVS (Application >Visualization System), > >a) has anyone ported this to an SGI machine (probably GTX architecture) since > >b) does SGI have any plans to provide such a higher level visualization tool (a) Well, now that the version of AVS (2) is out that's really usable we're considering it. The question that we have is at what level to actually "port" and where to do function emulation. AVS is based on the Stellar native PHIGS+ (for the most part) GL. I'm not sure that it makes sense to spend the time wrapping the SGI GL to fit Stellar's GL, and I don't want to spend the money on an SGI PHIGS only to wrap the ugly stuff anyway. What I'm leaning toward right now (at least until I see the AVS code) is using the AVS UI and data-flow on top of Wavefront's Visual C. (b) Well..., it seems to me that it was someone at SGI who had a paper on data-flow paradigms published in ACM Graphics back in (?) '84. Where do think AVS came from? (:-)