geomview

[munzner]

Below is the README from the latest release.

Tamara Munzner          ((555) 555-5555
munzner at geom.umn.edu    The Geometry Center  


                      Geomview/OOGL Release 1.3.2
                         The Geometry Center
			   March 1, 1993
			   ----------------

INTRODUCTION
------------
                                   
This is version 1.3.2 of Geomview/OOGL. It runs on Silicon Graphics
IRIS workstations.  This directory contains the binary distribution;
for information on the source code, see the SOURCE CODE section below.

Geomview is an interactive geometry viewing program.  OOGL, which
stands for Object Oriented Graphics Library, is the library upon which
Geomview is built.

If you use geomview please send an email note to
geomview-users-request at 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.

RUNNING GEOMVIEW
----------------

To run geomview, cd to this directory and type "geomview".  The
current directory must be this directory (the one containing this
README file and the "geomview" file) in order for this to work.

If you want to be able to run geomview from a directory other than
this directory, or if you want to install it permanently on your
system, edit the file "geomview" with any text editor.  It is a shell
script that starts up geomview after setting some appropriate
environment variables, and has comments at the top telling you
what to do.

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:

4dview:		4-dimensional slicing & rotation
animate:	flip through a sequence of objects
corners:	create vector skeleton of object
crayola:	interactively color objects
eucsyms:	explore the 230 3D Euclidean symmetry groups
flythrough:	interactive version of "Not Knot" hyperbolic flythrough
ginsu:		interactively slice objects
graffiti:	draw line segments on objects
gvclock:	3D clock, demonstrates real-time motion
hinge:		hinge copies of a polyhedron around its edges
linkmover:	evolve a link in 3-space
maniview:	3-manifold viewer
nose:		demonstrates picking
pssnap:		generate PostScript snapshot
stereo:		supports hardware, crosseyed, red/cyan stereo (beta version)
sweep:		generate objects of rotation from line segments
tackdown:	redefine an object's "home" position
transformer:	explicitly control an object's transformation matrix
trigrp:		explore triangle symmetry groups
warp:		interactively deform an object


AUXILLIARY PROGRAMS
-------------------

anytooff:	convert any OOGL object into OFF format
bdy:            compute the boundary edges of a geom as a VECT file
geomstuff:	utility to send your program's output to geomview via a pipe
math2oogl:	convert Mathematica graphics object to OOGL (see OOGL.m.doc)
offconsol:      consolidate duplicate vertices in an OFF file
oogl2rib:	convert OOGL to RenderMan RIB (see OOGL.m.doc)

DOCUMENTATION
-------------

The file doc/overview gives a general overview of geomview.  The file
doc/oogltour goes into more detail about the OOGL file format, which
is the format of geometry files that geomview reads.  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


DISK SPACE REQUIREMENTS
-----------------------

The geomview distribution file, geomview.tar.Z, occupies about 4
megabytes.  Unpacked, the distribution occupies about 7.5 megabytes.
This includes geomview, its documentation, example files, and many
geomview modules.  If you do not have enough space for all of this you
may obtain various pieces of the distribution separately via anonymous
ftp from geom.umn.edu.

SOURCE CODE
-----------

The source code for geomview/OOGL is available via anonymous ftp from
geom.umn.edu.  With this release we have decided to concentrate more
on packaging the binary version and less on the source code.  It is
our experience that the majority of our users are more interested in
running geomview than in looking at or modifying its source code.  At
the time of this writing the source code for the present version is
not yet ready for distribution, but older versions are available.  If
you are interested in obtaining the source code for the present
version send a note to software@geom.umn.edu and we will try to speed
the process of packaging it up.


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 Mark Meuer, Steve
Anderson, Mario Lopez, Todd Kaplan.  The current version was written
by Stuart Levy, Tamara Munzner, Mark Phillips, and Celeste Fowler.
Charlie Gunn has continued to work on OOGL, Scott Wisdom wrote the
Renderman driver, and Nathaniel Thurston wrote the motion code.


GEOMVIEW E-MAIL
---------------

There are two electronic mail addresses for communication regarding
geomview:

geomview-users at 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 at 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.


MISCELLANEOUS
-------------

For a list of changes since the last version (1.2.3), 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
----------

The conformal-ball model of hyperbolic space is not yet fully
implemented.  It only works with polylist (OFF) objects and does not
work at all in "flat" shading mode.

Picking does not work if any part of any object is behind the camera plane.