Questions about your Rendering Software on SG Iris Workstations

[mbp]

Oops.  Forgot to CC this to software.  Here's a copy:

[ To: wallraff at acds.physik.rwth-aachen.de ]

Andreas,
   We have an interactive display program called "geomview" for IRIS
workstations that displays a variety of geometry formats, and a
Mathematica package that will convert Mathematica graphics objects
into one of these formats.
   Geomview is interactive --- it lets you move things around with the
mouse in real-time.  In theory it can handle as many polygons as you
want to give it, but of course redraw time is proportional to the
number of things being drawn.  The maximum number you can have and
still get reasonable interaction time depends on the hardware and on
the type of data format.  The most efficient data type is our "mesh"
type; we have heard from people who have successfully displayed meshes
with around 300,000 grid points (on a VGX, I believe).
   All our software is available via anonymous ftp on the internet
from host geom.umn.edu.  Geomview is in the directory "pub/geomview".
You can either get the source-code in the file geomview.tar.Z and
compile it yourself, or you can get a precompiled version in the file
geomview-bin.tar.Z.  Both versions include documentation and example
data files.  The package that converts Mathematica graphics objects to
geomview format is distributed separately, in the file mathoogl.tar.Z.
   NOTE: the Mathematica conversion package creates "OFF" files, which
is one of our geometry formats.  For large data sets the mesh type is
more efficient.  If your data can be represented as a mesh, you may be
better off generating a mesh file yourself.  (The data file formats
are documented in the file man/cat/oogl.5 in the geomview
distribution.)

Mark Phillips                   email: mbp at geom.umn.edu
The Geometry Center             phone: ((555) 555-5555
1300 South Second Street        fax:   ((555) 555-5555
Minneapolis, MN  55454