Geomview/OOGL Release 1.4.1
The Geometry Center
November 16, 1993
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INTRODUCTION
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This is version 1.4.1 of Geomview/OOGL. It runs on Silicon Graphics
IRIS workstations, on NeXT computers under NeXTStep 3.0, and on NextStep/Intel
under NeXTStep 3.1. Work is underway on an X version.
Geomview is an interactive geometry viewing program. OOGL, which
stands for Object Oriented Graphics Library, is the library upon which
Geomview is built.
NOTE: Please read the file REGISTER. We need to know how our users
are using Geomview so that we can better serve you.
In addition, if you use geomview please send an email note to
geomview-users-request@geom.umn.edu requesting to be added to the
geomview-users mailing list; this list is for announcements regarding
geomview and for geomview users to communicate with each other. See
the details in the GEOMVIEW E-MAIL section below.
INSTALLATION
----------------
See the INSTALL file for installation details. Disk space required:
geomview-next.tar, installed 15.5 MB
geomview-sgi.tar.Z, untarred 12.5 MB
geomview.tar.Z
source only, untarred 7 MB
source, compiled for Next (fat binaries) & SGI 107 MB
source, compiled for SGI only 80 MB
Editing makefiles/Makedefs.global to set COPTS = -O
rather than the default COPTS = -g yields:
source, compiled for SGI only, COPTS=-O 61 MB
source, compiled for NeXT, fat binaries, COPTS=-O 52 MB
MORE ABOUT GEOMVIEW
-------------------
Geomview represents the current state of an ongoing effort at the
Geometry Center to provide interactive geometry software which is
particularly appropriate for mathematics research and education. In
particular, geomview can display things in hyperbolic and spherical
space as well as Euclidean space.
Geomview allows multiple independently controllable objects and
cameras. It provides interactive control for motion, appearances
(including lighting, shading, and materials), picking on an object,
edge or vertex level, snapshots in SGI image file or Renderman RIB
format, and adding or deleting objects is provided through direct
mouse manipulation, control panels, and keyboard shortcuts. External
programs can drive desired aspects of the viewer (such as continually
loading changing geometry or controlling the motion of certain
objects) while allowing interactive control of everything else.
Geomview supports the following simple data types: polyhedra with
shared vertices (.off), quadrilaterals, rectangular meshes, vectors,
and Bezier surface patches of arbitrary degree including rational
patches. Object hierarchies can be constructed with lists of objects
and instances of object(s) transformed by one or many 4x4 matrices.
Arbitrary portions of changing hierarchies may be transmitted by
creating named references.
Geomview can display Mathematica graphics output; for information
on this see the file OOGL.m.doc in the "doc" subdirectory.
EXTERNAL MODULES
----------------
Geomview comes with several "external modules" --- programs that
communicate with geomview through a command language. The list of
currently installed modules appears in the "Applications" browser on
geomview's main panel. To invoke a module, click the mouse on the
appropriate line in this browser. The modules in this distribution
are:
MODULE PLATFORMS DESCRIPTION
4dview: S 4-dimensional slicing & rotation
CellularAutomata: S cellular automata animation
animate: SN flip through a sequence of objects
clipboard: S cut, copy and paste geometric objects
corners: S create vector skeleton of object
crayola: SN interactively color objects
drawbdy: SN compute and draw the boundary of an object
flythrough: S interactive version of "Not Knot" hyperbolic flythrough
ginsu: S interactively slice objects
graffiti: SN draw line segments on objects
gvclock: SN 3D clock, demonstrates real-time motion
hinge: S hinge copies of a polyhedron around its edges
maniview: S 3-manifold viewer
nose: SN demonstrates picking
pssnap: SN generate PostScript snapshot
stereo: S hardware, crosseyed, red/cyan stereo (beta version)
sweep: SN generate objects of rotation from line segments
tackdown: S redefine an object's "home" position
transformer: S explicitly control an object's transformation matrix
trigrp: S explore triangle symmetry groups
warp: SN interactively deform an object
AUXILIARY PROGRAMS
-------------------
PROGRAM PLATFORMS DESCRIPTION
anytooff: SN convert any OOGL object into OFF format
bdy: SN compute the boundary edges of a geom as a VECT file
geomstuff: S pipe your program's OOGL data to geomview via a pipe
math2oogl: SN convert Mathematica graphics object to OOGL format
offconsol: SN consolidate duplicate vertices in an OFF file
oogl2rib SN convert OOGL to RenderMan RIB (see OOGL.m.doc)
togeomview: SN pipe GCL commands or geometry to a copy of geomview,
invoking geomview if necessary
(S means SGI version exists, N means NeXTStep version exists)
DOCUMENTATION
-------------
A comprehensive manual is in the "doc" subdirectory.
The file doc/oogltour gives an introduction to the OOGL file format,
which is the format of geometry files that geomview reads. More
details are in the manual.
Further documentation is in the "man" directory, which contains Unix
manual pages in both nroff source and formatted form. Each external
module, as well as geomview itself, has a manual page. Of particular
interest are:
man/cat1/geomview.1 geomview man page
man/cat5/geomview.5 geomview command language reference
manual
man/cat5/oogl.5 OOGL file format reference manual
doc/OOGL.m.doc documentation for interface to
Mathematica
GEOMVIEW E-MAIL
---------------
There are three electronic mail addresses for communication regarding
geomview:
geomview-users@geom.umn.edu:
This is a mailing list of people using geomview and can be used
for communication between users regarding geomview problems,
questions, experiences, etc. The geomview authors are also a part
of this list and will respond to questions posted to it. We also
use this list to make announcements about new releases and other
things of interest to users. To be added to or removed from the
geomview-users list, send a note to geomview-users-request@geom.umn.edu
software@geom.umn.edu:
This is the "official" support line; it reaches the geomview
authors directly. In general if you have a question or comment
that may be of interest to other users, send it to the
"geomview-users" address. Use "software" for communication
intended just for the authors; in particular, send bug reports and
suggestions for improvement to this address.
registry@geom.umn.edu
Use this address to tell us what you are doing with Geomview. The
Geometry Center is funded by the National Science Foundation, and
it is important that we be able to report to NSF the ways in which
our software is being used. If you use Geomview in your work
please send us a note at this address telling us what you are
doing with it. See the file REGISTRY for more details. Please do
not send bug reports or questions to this address; use
"software@geom.umn.edu" for that.
HISTORY
-------
This project began in the sumer of 1988 with the work of Pat Hanrahan
on a viewing program called MinneView. Shortly thereafter Charlie
Gunn begin developing OOGL in conjunction with MinneView. In the time
since then, many people have contributed, including Stuart Levy, Mark
Meuer, Tamara Munzner, Steve Anderson, Mario Lopez, Todd Kaplan.
In 1991, OOGL was rewritten and a new viewer geomview was begun. Both
geomview and the new OOGL have a core of device-independent common
code. Currently there are device drivers for SGI GL, PhotoRealistic
RenderMan, and Quick RenderMan on the NeXT. The NeXT version of
geomview was written by Daniel Krech and Scott Wisdom. Scott Wisdom
wrote the Photo Realistic and Quick RenderMan OOGL drivers. The SGI
version of geomview and OOGL was written by Stuart Levy, Tamara
Munzner, and Mark Phillips. The geomview common kernel was written by
Stuart Levy, Tamara Munzner, and Mark Phillips, with contributions
from Nathaniel Thurston and Celeste Fowler.
MISCELLANEOUS
-------------
For a list of changes between versions, see the file CHANGES.
Geomview is copyrighted software. Please read the file COPYING in
this directory before using or distributing Geomview.
The file MANIFEST contains a list of the files in this distribution.
KNOWN BUGS
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Picking does not work if any part of any object is behind the camera plane.
IMPROVEMENTS/WISH LIST
----------------------
More modules will be converted to NeXTStep, and the way modules are
handled on under NeXTSTEP should improve.
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.