Announcement of Volren 4.0 

-- A high performance volume renderer for the Onyx Reality Engine (tm) --


Many of you have asked about getting a copy of the volume renderer
which exploits the 3-D hardware texture mapping on the Onyx Reality
Engine.

A compressed tar file can be fetched from sgigate.sgi.com in the
~ftp/pub/demos directory.  Login as "ftp" and provide your email
address as the password (e.g. "foo@bar.com").  The file of interest
called "volren-4.0.tar.Z".

Uncompress the tar file using zcat or uncompress.  The tar file
contains a directory called "version-4.0" which in turn contains a
collection of directories.  The subdirectory entitled 'dist' contains
two installable subsystems.  One subsystem contains the executable,
example scripts demonstrating use of the command line arguments, and a
man page.  The other contains the source code used to build the volume
renderer.  Once you've untar'd the file become super user and type:
"inst -af version-4.0/dist".  This will install the software in
"/usr/demos/volren".

If you want the software to live on another disk make
"/usr/demos/volren" a link to right place before you run inst.
Inst will always check before doing the install so you won't get part
way through and fail because of a lack of space.

We have decided to distribute the software using inst so that we can
release new versions and have inst do the work of replacing or
updating files.  So if you planned to hack the source, it's a good
idea to make your own copy after installing.  You can delete the
"version-4.0" directory after you're done installing.  In the coming
months we plan to release an OpenGL version of this program.  So keep
posted.

The remaining directories in 'volren-4.0' demonstrate how to use the
volume renderer (the command line arguments), show the format of
lookup table and volume data, and provide some necessary libraries for
running the renderer.  These directories are 'bin', 'data', and 'lib'
respectively.

To get started, after installing the software with 'inst', change
directories to 'volren-4.0/bin'.  Run the 'eggcreadslice' script.
This will load four example tables and an example data set.

SGI reserves the right to maintain this software as much or as little
as it sees fit.  Bugs fixes, explanations and installation help are
not guaranteed.

If you have questions concerning the general use, installation, or design of the program contact:

	cabral@sgi.com (Brian Cabral)

	and/or

	kulick@esd.sgi.com (Todd Kulick)


Thanks and have fun!