Zhu3D 4.1.0

[Heinz van Saanen]

Name: Zhu3D
Version: 4.1.0
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 XP-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
CPU-power and automatically utilizes up to 16
parallel 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 4.0.8

- The benchmark calculates relative "Isomarks" too
now. So the effect of misc. thread settings or
compiler switches can be evaluated quickly
- Changed the benchmark-file to be more suitable
for Isomarks Note: This file must contain exactly
one isosurface-equation mandatory now
- Added additional sanity checks for file-loading.
Any potential malware attack through a Zhu3D-file
should be completely impossible now
- Slightly adjusted menu-structures for better
gui-conformance
- Small optimizations and code polishing in the
iso-OpenGL-parts and elsewhere
- Revised translation files
- Updated readme.txt in regards to Postscript. My
new Linux-box renders ps-files up to
"poster-formats" like 10000x10000 e.g. without
problems now
- Small enhancements in the html-code of the
help-docs
- The builtin QTextBrowser for the new Qt4 4.4.x
has some minor troubles with html. Switched
default help-browser for the very first start to
"external" therefore. This may be a better choice
anyhow
- Despite improvements the download is smaller
again than 4.0.8

What was new in 4.0.8

- Added multicore-support for
isosurface-tessellations when user-defined
functions are enabled. The whole time critical
iso-stuff is multithreaded up to 16 CPU-cores now
without any exceptions
- Updated fparser to the new 2.83 release which
fixes some small parsing errors in combination
with the optimizer
- Removed never referenced functions from the 2.83
optimizer
- Switched solver module to fparser 2.83
- Adopted two examples due to slight parser
changes and documented this. Important: all
constants and function-parameters must have
different names now mandatory
- Speeded up parser-inits for the "File/New"
menu-action
- Removed 2.x-3.x file support as announced. This
shrinks code-and executable-sizes considerably as
well as compilation time
- Minor typo-fixes, renamings,
install.txt-updates, ...
- Raised Windows version to Qt 4.3.5
- Replaced ugly macro-RNG's with a clean and fast
RNG-class
- Replaced CPU-clockcycle-stuff with an optimzed
class
- Removed CPU-clock display for Windows. The
granularity of the Windows-timers is simply too
bad for this
- The solver display does not show comments and
empty functions any more. Replaced these by a
mathematically more sounding 0
- Stripped html-docs again to save some KB in
download size
- Updated intel-icc.txt in regards to errors with
gcc 4.3.x
- Updated readme.txt in regards to errors with Qt4
4.4.0. Trolltech fixed a severe bug in newer
snapshots
- Fixed a (harmless) error message for a uic-part
of Qt4.4.2 snaphot release
- Inserting rows in user defined tables did not
work under some seldom circumstances. Fixed
- Entering something in the last row of the user
defined table did not set the current row pointer
correctly. Fixed
- Fixed a small header dependency issue for the
newer gcc 4.3.x compilers
- Eliminated (harmless) compiler warnings with gcc
4.3.1