Zhu3D 3.0.4

[Heinz van Saanen]

Name: Zhu3D
Version: 3.0.4
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:
 What is new in 3.0.4

- Some small speed-optimizations in the
OpenGL-part
- Some speed/precision relevant changes in the
Warp-parsers. Documented these changes better now
- Some code-shrink measurements reflecting in
reduced program size, memory footprint and
increased parser speed
- Made internal help-window browseable via
hyperlinks now. A nice side effect is
simplification and code reduction
- Decreased rotation offsets what results in finer
grain control for animations. Old zhu-files may
have to be readjusted for speed
- Raised maximum texture span width for smoother
handling of huge textures. Try out the big
Nasa-textures for a Google-earth feeling:-)
- Removed fixed limits for maximum textures size.
Take automatically whatever the GPU is capable of
now
- Added CPU core detection for MacOS, SGI and
Windows
- Entering syntactical blunder and not correcting
it caused a crash when opening a file or switching
modes immediately afterwards. Fixed
- My HTML-editor NVU produced tons of senseless
blank lines in the help-html's. Deleted them, what
saves around 45 KB
- Polishing/adjusting examples

What was new in 3.0.2

- Changed data types/counters so that 64-bit
compilers could benefit more. This results in
faster 64-bit code for triangle-generation,
parser-stuff, iso-generation, flipping textures,
solver, ...
- Some floating point optimizations in the time
critical function-parsers and the OpenGL-part
- Alligned local tables for iso-triangulation on
128-bit boundaries. This may help auto-vectorizing
compilers. Intels icc 10.0 gets a speed-rocket eg,
but unfortunately fails with some OpenGL-drawings
- Ensured that the solver reaches it's maximum
accuracy of true 15-digits shown
- The system info detects the number of CPU-cores
too now
- Made system clock detection more accurate and
reliable. The average error seems to be smaller
than 0.05 % now
- Removed "struct timezone" from timers as this is
declared obsolete under Linux
- For power users: raised maximal texture size to
2^14=16384
- Under certain circumstances after loading a
parametric system single checkboxes where not
updated. Fixed
- Some optical fine-tuning for examples