---------------------------------------------------------------------- Announcement of Volren 5.0 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- What Is It? ----------- Volren is a hardware accelerated volume renderer based upon the texture mapping capabilities available in Silicon Graphics' Onyx Reality Engine architecture. The renderer provides the ability to control the mapping from scalar data value to color and opacity as well as the ability to render voxel and geometric data together. The renderer loads data as a collection of 2D image files in one of many formats. What's New? ----------- Since volren version 4.0 numerous enhancements have been made to volren. Below is an incomplete list: Open GL and Iris GL support --------------------------- Volren can now be easily compiled for IrisGL or Opengl. Volren OpenGL requires Irix 5.3 and patch 154. Additionally compile time definitions exist to assist in enabling/disabling various components of the renderer based upon the hardware features available (auxilary buffers, texture interleaving, texture objects, texture lookup tables, stereo). Multiple Volume support ----------------------- Volren now supports loading multiple volumes concurrently. The volumes can intersect each other arbitrarily and will be correctly merged and rendered. Each volume can be translated and rotated individually. Additionally, each volume can use its own texture lookup table allowing an enormous range of flexibility in merged rendering. Time Variant Volume support --------------------------- Volren can now load four dimensional volumes that change over time. The animation rate is controllable from the command line and the user interface. These time variant volumes can be loaded with normal volumes or other time variant volumes or both. Argument Checking Code improved ------------------------------- Volren no longer dies when invoked with data sets that are not a power of two on a side. Additionally it now supports displaying its version number and the hardware options that were compiled into it. Geometry Code improved ---------------------- The geometric matrix code is entirely rewritten and much cleaner. The source is much more readable and a description of the different important coordinate spaces exists in src/README.CODERS. Stereo Viewing support ---------------------- Volren version 5.0 supports stereo. The stereo code is reworked and looks better than ever. Numerous Other fixes -------------------- Option to disable generation of four-bit bricks. Slice plane extents now computed correctly. Picking works right in perspective and orthogonal modes. Pixel replication mode works correctly again. Brick seaming code reworked; minor bugs fixed. Supports two resampling filters (box and triangle). Updated man page and data sets! How Do I Get It? ---------------- 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 is called "volren-5.tar.Z". Uncompress the tar file using zcat or uncompress. Untarring the file should produce a directory called "volren-5". This directory contains this README, a binary directory (bin/) containing two versions of the renderer and various scripts, five data sets, a man page for volren, and inst'able images containing the source code for volren. To try volren, just: $ cd volren-5/bin $ ./head To permanently install volren on a system, use the inst(1M) program. You can choose to install the data, binaries, or sources (or all of the above.) All files will be installed in /usr/demos/volren. Try doing: $ inst -f volren-5/dist Structure --------- Below is the basic structure of this distribution of volren. README This file. bin/ The Iris/Open GL volume renderers and scripts. catman/ Packed man pages. data/ Data files. dist/ Inst'able version containing data, source, binaries. man/ Nroff format man pages. Administrivia ------------- 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. For more information see src/Copyright. If you have questions, comments, or remarks about volren feel free to contact: Brian Cabral cabral@sgi.com Todd Kulick kulick@sgi.com Thanks and have fun!