View3D Overview - Benefits and Features

Benefits

• Harnessed power of OpenGL
  View3D offers a unique combination of low level flexibility with a high level API for ease of use. Thanks to its use of OpenGL, the widely accepted 3D graphics standard, and its design as a Motif widget, View3D offers the applications developer a fully functional yet easy-to-use 3D tool that is readily customizable to your application. Learning time for a new developer to write 3D applications with View3D is minimal, and the conciseness of the resulting code makes maintenance straightforward. 
  
  View3D is a tool which requires almost no knowledge of 3D graphics. Any application developer with a background in X Windows and Motif programming can create a 3D application without special training. 
  
  
• Visualization of any kind of data quickly and easily
  A major benefit of View3D is the ease with which objects can be created in the 3D scene, with no special knowledge of computer graphics or OpenGL required. Many basic graphics object types are supported, including mesh surfaces, raster objects, 3D volumes, geometrical objects, lines and points. Mesh surfaces may be single or multi-valued surfaces composed of a mesh of triangles, quadrilaterals or arbitrarily shaped polygons. Objects may be assigned a range of material properties, such as color, transparency, texture, and reflectivity (matt or metallic). Built in editors are provided to enable the application developer to control these properties as well as global properties, such as lighting. Users may interactively edit the material of any object, and set their color and transparency. 
  
  Selection, picking and editing in 3D can be very involved operations with many graphics toolkits. With View3D these features are easily controlled via callbacks; an application need only register the callbacks to use the functionality. Once registered, a selection callback, for instance, is generated whenever the user performs a select action, and the callback function is passed a pointer to the object that was selected. Picking returns the object picked, the 3D point picked, the normal at the point (if applicable), as well as the closest vertex on the object at the picked point. 
  
  
• Excellent graphics performance and memory efficiency
  By utilizing the power of OpenGL, View3D offers optimal graphics performance on all platforms. Rendering algorithms have been highly optimized to deliver the best possible performance. View3D is memory efficient, particularly when dealing with multiple data views, since its MVC architecture logically separates data views from the data descriptions. 
  
  
• Portable
  View3D is available on all major UNIX platforms. And because it is uses OpenGL, applications built with View3D can take advantage of graphics hardware accelerators where available to improve performance. If you don’t have OpenGL then you can simply use the publicly available Mesa OpenGL library which is supplied free with View3D.
  

Features

• Low maintenance overhead - View3D applications are concise yet powerful, making maintenance straightforward, and enhancements by other developers simple. 
  
  
• Fast - Highly optimized rendering algorithms and its use of OpenGL graphics mean that View3D offers optimal performance and memory usage on a wide range of platforms. 
  
  
• Extensive functionality - Full functionality ranging from simple 3D surface displays and charts to representations of complex 3D objects and designs are all possible using View3D. 
  
  
• Objected Oriented Architecture - Uses a Model View Controller (MVC) architecture that logically separates data views from the data descriptions, simplifying the process of creating multiple views of 3D objects and updating the data structures dynamically. 
  
  
• Multiple data types - Numerous objects types are supported, including mesh surfaces, faceted surfaces, line segments and polylines, point clouds, markers, raster images, geometrical shapes (sphere, cone, cylinder and cube), and groups of graphical objects. 
  
  
• Variety of material types - Objects may be assigned material properties including color, transparency and texture mapping. 
  
  
• Built-in editors - Built-in editors are provided to simplify scene manipulation, including material properties, lighting, color selection and global parameters. 
  
  
• Multiple light sources - Multiple light sources per scene are available, all with user-definable location and intensity, and may be spotlights or point lights. 
  
  
• Animation - Objects may be dynamically moved about a scene, and rotated about any arbitrary vector. 
  
  
• GUI builder integration - View3D is fully integrated with leading GUI builders, including UIM/X, Builder Xcessory, X Designer and others, enabling you to use View3D from your standard GUI design palette. 
  
  
• Selection and picking - All objects in the display can be selected with the mouse. Using Selection or Picking is as easy as registering a callback. When the user selects an object, that object is returned to the application. 
  
  
• Interactive editing support - Users may manipulate and edit objects in the display simply calling a function to enable editing. This enables data not only to be visualised in 3D, but for models to be editing and corrected in the same display, and the changes passed back to the application. 
  
  
• Multiple data views - Thanks to its MVC architecture, multiple views can be generated on the same object in different View3D windows, and multiple View3D windows can be used in a single application. 
  
  
• Global optimization options - Global flags are provided to improve performance and memory overhead through disabling or enabling lighting, normal calculation, outline calculation, computation of polygon data elements, and local storage options. 
  
  
• Portability - View3D is available on major Unix workstations including Sun Solaris, HP, IBM, SGI, PCs running Linux, and also on Windows NT via DataFocus NuTCRACKER libraries.   
  
  
• No runtime fees, no royalties - You can distribute end-user applications that use View3D free of any royalties or runtime fees.  Free support for 30 days. Renewable annual support and upgrades. FTP site available for patches, and website for current information on new releases, FAQ, documentation, etc.