Zhu3D 3.2.9

[Heinz van Saanen]

Name: Zhu3D
Version: 3.2.9
Type: KDE 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 equation
systems 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.

Besides the built in functions and constants you
can define your own ones. These user defined
functions can have an arbitrary amount of
parameters, can be nested or even be recursive.
For special purposes the function parsers support
if-conditions and boolean operators.

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 can be
visualized with different volume-based algorithms.

Zhu3D runs under Linux/Unix, Windows 98/XP/Vista
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 >=4.2 and support for OpenGL
>=1.2. The latter can be a software implementation
like Mesa. The qmake easily can be taylored for
special needs, what supports packagers.

HW-REQUIREMENTS:

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. The costly isosurface tessellation
automatically supports multicore CPU's.

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.
A complete Windows version is available - special
thanks to Victor Fernandez, who is hosting this!


Have fun, Heinz van Saanen

Changelog:
 Packagers: Due to heavy changes you should wait
for 3.3.0 (see above)

What is new in 3.2.9

- Complete code review. Substitutions of global
dependencies with signals, substantial code
reductions, formatting, optimizations, typos,
naming conventions, ...
- The executable is as small again as many
versions ago
- Added new demo mode. You comfortable can browse
through all examples with just one click now. Note
that you really can do everything within demo mode
what can be done normally. Opening editors,
solving, changing light properties, ...
- Most demo examples will be performed extremely
quick even on older hardware. The exceptions are
some single examples which stress multicore-CPU's,
OpenGL or parsers. Here you simply will need some
seconds patience when using ancient hardware
- Function input can be completely empty now for
comfort. There is no need to mark blank functions
with a comment anymore
- Changed file format. You still can read old
Zhu3D files, but older releases will fail to read
the new format
- Updated all examples to new file format
- The continous and repeated input of blunder
without correcting it opened many doors for a
crash. Fixed. Zhu3D should hopefully never crash
now, independent from whatever junk you may feed
in
- Main window and OpenGL-viewer are locked on
erroneous inputs
- New user items can be defined or changed only,
when previous input was error free
- Small bug in animation-setup under "File/New".
Fixed
- Adding a faulty constant may have shown an
unspecific or wrong error message. Fixed
- Small corrections in French and Chinese language
files
- Used re-emerged upload headroom to add new
examples

What was new in 3.2.0

- Loading a texture automatically enables it too
now for comfort
- Replaced hyperbolic functions (asinh,...) in the
parsers with their built in counterparts. The
effect is simplification and speed up. This is not
fully standard compliant, but all modern compilers
like GCC or ICC will support this
- Shrinked the object size of the high-precision
solver parsers considerably. This minimizes
memory-footprint too
- Added some more security checks in the texture
module
- I found Zhu3D quite useful for icon creation:-)
Shrinked minimum viewer size to 32x32 for
real-time/real-size previews now
- Removed all limitations for benchmarks. You can
use textured files for benchmarks now or start
them while running a animation
- Function systems can be solved during animations
too now. This is mainly for fully transparent
usage
- Starting a benchmark-run in iso-mode did not
properly restore the iso-editor when finished.
Fixed
- Updated html-docs. Thanks again to Yanqing and
Henri Girard for maintaining Chinese translations