drichard@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (David Richards) (04/03/91)
The local cluster of amiga-philes is very close to convincing influential members of the math faculty that the Amiga is the ideal machine for handling the complex graphical manipulation of mathematically generated 3d objects. Here is our problem. Although our vax has an extremely powerful graphics utility (Mathlib) that can create and display representaions of just about any system you could think of, its capabilites end when it comes to display. If you want to do something like view from another angle, the entire object must be regenerated almost from scratch. We would like to invoke some kind of package on the amiga to read the vax generated data, then play with it using something like a mouse or even a joystick. Simplicity of operation is essential. Mathlib can write the data in any form that can be well specified. It current supports something like 100 different terminals and hardcopy devices. It would be no problem to get the data in x,y,z format, or in a form readable by almost any common piece of hardware. If needed it would not be hard to write a new device driver that would output the data in whatever perverted form some package would want. Wire fram graphics would certainly be acceptable. We're working mostly with graphs and such so we don't have much use for ray tracing. Now the question. What package will do this best? I am unfamiliar with all of the major graphics packages currently available, so I have no background to work with at all. Please send me your suggestions, if we can make the Amiga perform well, it will mean a major foothold on this campus. We think macs and PC's have prevailed long enough! Thanks, Dave drichards@hmcvax.claremont.edu
mikep@hpmwtd.HP.COM (Mike Powell) (04/05/91)
Perhaps your best bet would be Videoscape 2.0. It doesn't have the *best* image quality (it is not a ray-tracer...) but it does suppport all IFF modes, and what might be best of all, Videoscape supports object files in a very simple ASCII text format. Conversion to this format should be pretty easy... Basically, it consists of a list of points (x,y,z), followed by a list of polygons referenced to the points. Eg: (# of pnts.),point 1, point 2, point 3....,color/texture code. There may be some ray-tracing packages that accept ASCII files or have a well documented binary format. One other plus about videoscape is that it is fairly fast when it renders... allowing the construction of animations quickly and easily. (it can save animations in the popular '.anim' format). You should be able to find it for well less than $100. -Mike-
jesup@cbmvax.commodore.com (Randell Jesup) (04/06/91)
In article <11503@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> drichard@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (David Richards) writes: > >The local cluster of amiga-philes is very close to convincing influential >members of the math faculty that the Amiga is the ideal machine for handling >the complex graphical manipulation of mathematically generated 3d objects. >Wire fram graphics would certainly be acceptable. We're working mostly >with graphs and such so we don't have much use for ray tracing. Calagari (I think there's a "junior" version) does real-time wire-frame viewing, with an easily changable point of view via mouse. It will also render (shaded) the object quickly. May be a bit pricey or overkill. I suspect several object editors will do the job also. -- Randell Jesup, Keeper of AmigaDos, Commodore Engineering. {uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!jesup, jesup@cbmvax.commodore.com BIX: rjesup Disclaimer: Nothing I say is anything other than my personal opinion. Thus spake the Master Ninjei: "To program a million-line operating system is easy, to change a man's temperament is more difficult." (From "The Zen of Programming") ;-)