Zhu3D 3.4.4

[Heinz van Saanen]

Name: Zhu3D
Version: 3.4.4
Type: KDE Scientific
Depend: Qt 4.x
License: GPL
Homepage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/zhu3d/
More Info:
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=43071

Description:
 Zhu3D is an interactive OpenGL-based mathematical
function viewer. You can visualize explicite
functions, parametric systems and isosurfaces. The
viewer supports zooming, scaling and rotating as
well as filed lighting or surface properties.
Special effects are animations, morphing,
transparency, textures, fog and motion blur.
Equation systems can be solved with a fast
adaptive random search.

You have up to 8 lights, background settings,
wire-modes or illumination models. For picture
rendering and textures all common formats are
recognized. User-defined functions can have any
amount of parameters, can be nested or recursive.
For special purposes if-clauses and boolean
operators are supported. Isosurfaces can use
different volume-based algorithms.

Zhu3D runs under Linux/Unix, Windows 98-Vista and
Mac OS X and is fully localized for English,
German, Spanish, French and Chinese. API's like
KDE, Gnome, Motif, Mac OS or Windows are supported
natively. All these settings can be changed
dynamically at runtime. The application comes with
extended help files and a lot of examples. A
precompiled and ready-to-go Windows version is
available.

HARDWARE:

For basic viewings even a slow PC without
HW-OpenGL may be sufficient. However, goddies like
motion blur or animation are a challenge for every
GPU. Isosurface tessellation needs a lot of power
and automatically utilizes up to 16 parallel
CPU-threads therefore.

COMPILING:

All unnecessary dependencies are strictly avoided.
You just will need Qt >=4.3 and OpenGL >=1.2
whereas OpenGL may be a software implementation
like Mesa. The qmake easily can be taylored for
special needs, what supports packagers.

VERSIONS:

Versions with odd numbers are considered as "pre".
These are not intended to be buggy, but the
testing facilities are limited. So packagers are
advised to wait for an even number.


Have fun, Heinz van Saanen

Changelog:
 What is new in 3.4.4

- Added load bar for CPU/GPU-utilization in
morphing editor. Note that this load bar shows the
CPU-portion mainly. In contrary the load bar in
the animation editor indicates the GPU-portion
mainly. Hence this has a GPU/CPU-tooltip instead
of CPU/GPU
- Enabled Postcript as picture format for Windows
- Enabled OpenGL alpha-buffers as default
- Disabled OpenGL multisampling due to performance
reasons. The visual drawbacks for this are quite
negligible
- Added missing threads-tooltip in
"Settings/General"
- Size/proportion optimizations for some
ui-widgets
- New and shorter timer code. Got rid of Windows
specific timers
- Picture rendering still could fail with ATI/AMD
drivers under Windows XP. Reenabled workaround
therefore
- Zhu3D is not longer tested on quite obsolete
Windows 98 platforms. It may or may not work
- In demo mode an automatic slideshow could fail
to proceed on very slow PC's. Fixed
- When morphing was enabled, file saving did not
store frames per second. Fixed
- Making a new install over a very old version
could lead to a crash due to system-settings and
thread-handling. Fixed
- Small code reductions and polishing
- Updated/shrinked translation files. Thanks to
Yanqing and Henri
- Updated documentation for Windows-peculiarities
in the readme
- Updated install.txt in regards to tested
platforms
- Some fine tuning for startup/logo-file and
examples

What was new in 3.4.2

- Spent a new "Special-menu" for better
structuring and to avoid too lengthy menu entries
elsewhere. For now it contains animation, morhping
and OpenGL-settings like textures or fog
- Animation and morphing have a quite similar
functionality. Unified user-interface gui's for
this reason
- Added new one-click morphing toolbar-button
analogueos to animation
- Changed background palette for
"Switch-editor"-button to highlight it's
importance
- Adjusted default values for morphing to provide
a reasonable behaviour for most situations. This
covers "File/new" as well as the startup file and
many examples
- Adjusted default values for texture span and
iso-meshes to be more suitable
- Added warning for file-loading when no
appropriate texture file is found
- Enabled OpenGL multi-sampling as default
- For simplification the OpenGL viewer-title is
not changed anymore
- Removed obsolete ui-entries
- An exit could have caused a (quite harmless)
memory error. Fixed
- Updated Spanish/Chinese ui-files and html's.
Thanks to Victor and Yanqing again
- Small optimizations throughout html help-files
- Some optical fine tuning for startup/logo-file
and examples