[Kde-announce-apps] Zhu3D 2.7.6

[Heinz van Saanen]

Name: Zhu3D
Version: 2.7.6
Type: Scientific
Depend: Qt 4.x
License: GPL
More Info:
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=43071

Description:
 With Zhu3D you interactively can view and animate
functions, isosurfaces and a further independent
parametric system. Numerical solutions of an
equation system can be found with a precise and
reliable adaptive random search. The OpenGL-viewer
supports zooming, scaling, rotating and
translating as well as filed lightning or surface
properties. Special effects are transparency,
textures, fog and motion blur.

You have up to eight independent lights or
spotlights, background settings, miscellaneous
wire-modes or global illumination models. Pictures
are rendered as PNG, JPG, PDF or PostScript and
can be of arbitrary size. For textures Zhu3D
recognizes nine common formats. Isosurfaces you
can be visualized with different volume-based
algorithms.

Zhu3D runs under Linux/Unix, Windows 98-XP and Mac
OS X and is localized for English, German,
Spanish, French and Chinese. It supports different
CPU's as well as different API's like KDE, Motiv,
Gnome or Windows. All settings can be changed
dynamically at runtime. The application comes with
extended help files and a lot of examples.

COMPILING:

All you need is Qt 4.1 or later and support for
OpenGL 1.2, what can be a software implementation
like Mesa. The qmake easily can be taylored for
special needs, what supports packagers.

HARDWARE:

For basic viewings even an old and slow PC without
hardware accelerated OpenGL is sufficient.
However, enabling goddies like animation, big
textures and especially motion blur is a challenge
for every GPU out there. On the other hand
isosurfaces with dense meshes need a lot of
CPU-power.

VERSIONS:

Whatever ends with an odd number, is considered as
"pre". Those versions are not intended to be
unfinished or buggy, but my testing capabilities
are limited to my own HW/SW-configurations. So
especially packagers may wait for an even number.
This happens after a significant amount of
downloads and no major problems reported. A
complete Windows version is available - special
thanks to Victor Fernandez, who is hosting this!

WINDOWS VISTA:

As probably most of you, I did not install the
marvellous Vista:-) Anyhow I would be interested,
if Zhu3D works with it as it should. A newer
Windows version is online now. If you can test it,
please give me a short e-mail notice.


Have fun, Heinz van Saanen

Changelog:
 What is new in 2.7.6

- Moved the parser from C to pretty clean C++ now.
Due to further optimations no speed penalty and
partially faster than before
- Added light speed $c as constant
- The parser understood the mathematical common
$e^a, a^b and a%b so far. Added the pendants
exp(a), pow(a,b) and mod(a,b) for completeness
- The modulus function accepts negative arguments
too now
- Added complete localization for French. Special
thanks to Henri Girard for translations
- Added GUI-localization for Chinese. Special
thanks to Yanqing and Henri Girard for
translations. In KDE Chinese works out of the box.
In Windows you have to play a
install/reboot-adventure for the East-Asian
language pack before
- Benchmark caused a warning for recursive redraw
and a potential hang up, when run multiple times.
Fixed
- Some optical tuning for examples

What was new in 2.7.4

- Statistically based parser optimation. Speed
improvement for parametric systems is mostly huge.
For functions and isosurfaces smaller but mostly
measurable
- Some tuning for OpenGL list handling. Especially
complexer Zhu3D files may be shown a lot faster
after loading now
- Added function log2() to the parsers
- Added detection of unknown constants in the
parser
- Solver reports can be saved as text files now
- Fixed a very special parser bug occuring in
expressions without multiplication signs with
following unitary operands or constants - not
enclosed by brackets - plus a further following
term. E.g. 5$pi2$pi^2+1 evaluates correctly now
- After perspective changes in 2.7.2 some of the
examples where slightly displaced. Corrected
- Added examples for isosurface union/intersection
- Some clean ups in translation files and error
messages

NOTE: The packages below may be behind the
original src.tar.gz of course.