Zhu3D 3.0.9

[Heinz van Saanen]

Name: Zhu3D
Version: 3.0.9
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 >=4.1 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.

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:
 Notes to packagers: Due to heavy changes this
version is declared as preliminary.

Notes to testers: users of 4-1024 core hardware
are highly welcome to respond.  

What is new in 3.0.9

- The expensive isosurface-tessellations are fully
multithreaded now. OpenGL-lists are not reentrant
by nature. However, the neccessary workarrounds
have no perceptible speed penalties for
single-core users. In longer calculations the
threads scale near to perfect
- Some workarrounds to make the Warp-parsers fully
reentrant
- Besides 2,4,8,16,... cores maybe upcomming CPUS
with uneven core-numbers are supported too
- Raised upper isosurface grid-limit to 128. Who
does not have a 16-core CPU may not benefit yet.
But this lefts some headroom for future hardware
developement
- Hint for developers: In the web I found not a
single advice or line of code how to make
OpenGL-lists threadsafe. If you are interested,
take a look at the source

What was new in 3.0.6

- Improved gui-responsiveness during long
isosurface-calculations
- A wait cursur indicates long calculations after
file loading now
- Restructured Application/Settings box in a more
sound manner. General gui and math settings are
not intermixed any more
- Reimplemented isosurface-tesselation as
reentrant class
- Speed/memory optimizations in the iso-part and
parsers
- Avoided a potential zero-division crash in light
calculation
- Introduced a bug in startup code two versions
ago, when the default file or a command line
argument are not found. Fixed
- Corrected erroneously commented out #define in
debug code
- Fixes/wokarrounds for Windows quirks. Zhu3D runs
with newest Qt-Win 4.3.2 flawlessly now
- Windows only: limitated solver precision to 11
digits due to some deficiencies
- Documented Windows limitations in the readme
better now
- Some code polishing, removing typos, ...