Zhu3D

Zhu3D is an interactive OpenGL-based mathematical function viewer. You can visualize explicite functions, parametric systems and isosurfaces. The viewer supports zooming, scaling and rotating as well as filed lighting or surface properties. Special effects are animation, morphing, transparency, textures, fog and motion blur. Equation systems can be solved with a fast adaptive random search.

You have up to 8 lights, background settings, wire-modes or different illumination models. For picture rendering and textures all common pic-formats are recognized. You can define your own customized functions to any desired complexity level, nested or even recursive functions inclusively. For special purposes if-clauses and boolean operators are supported. Isosurfaces can use different volume-based algorithms.

Zhu3D is originally designed for *nix-systems, but runs as well under Mac OS X or Windows 2000-Vista in all 32/64 bit-flavours. It is fully localized for English, German, Spanish, French and Chinese and partially for Czech (Gui only). API's like KDE, Gnome, Motif, Mac OS or Windows XP/Vista are supported natively. All these settings as well as most others can be changed dynamically at runtime. The application comes with extended help files and a lot of examples. A precompiled and ready-to-go Windows version is available.

HARDWARE:

For basic tasks even a really slow and ancient PC without HW-OpenGL may be sufficient. However, neat things like motion blur, morphing or isosorfaces are a challenge for every GPU/CPU out there. Zhu3D automatically utilizes up to 16 highly optimized parallel threads therefore. When compiling by yourself, you easely can enable vectorizing with SSE3 as an additional boost-option.

COMPILING:

All unnecessary dependencies are strictly avoided. So compiling is a mere child's play at your fingertips. Everything you need is Qt >=4.3 and OpenGL >=1.4 whereas OpenGL may even be a pure software implementation like Mesa. The qmake easily can be taylored for special needs, what supports packagers.


Have fun, Heinz van Saanen

What is new in 4.2.2

- New Qt4 4.5.1 changed the file-dialog behaviour for *nix so that setting new default directories fails. Patched
- Added a small patch necessary for new GCC 4.4.x
- Starting a demo with an empty workdir crashed. Fixed
- Reduced size of the zhu-data files for approx. 20%. Back/forward-compatibility with the current 4.x format remains unchanged

What was new in 4.2.0

- Fixed a false (and harmless) hardware detection warning for OpenGL. This may have appeared only once, when starting Zhu3D the very first time ever on your machine
- Fixed small compilation bug when debugging is enabled
- Fixed a (harmless) warning output on std::cerr when started from command line
- Added Czech GUI-translation. Special thanks to Pavel
- Added patch to handle new (and improved) toolbar behaviour in Qt 4.5.x. Dynamic toolbar-resizing is possible without code-workarounds in 4.5 now
- Added Gentoo 64/KDE4 as tested platform
- Made C/numeric-locale patch default for all Qt4-versions. Qt4 behaves unconsistent here, what is fixed always now
- Trimmed/slimmed the benchmark-code
- Enabled more aggressive compiler-optimisations as default
- Slightly improved and slimmed the hw-detection sequence in a logically more sounding manner. Improved CPU-detection
- Brushed up sources in regards to style-unification's and documentation. Eliminated tabs in favour of blanks
- Tweaked/updated the files zhu3d.pro and intel-icc.txt in regards of documentation and optimisation switches
- Culled out a small typo in all html-docs/translations. Small but disturbing in terms of mathematical correctness
- Applied slightly more 3D/depth feeling to the start-up/logo file. When using the Zhu3D-logo, please update it