Zhu3D 2.9.0 review
DownloadWith Zhu3D you interactively can view and animate functions, isosurfaces and a further independent parametric system
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With Zhu3D you interactively can view and animate functions, isosurfaces and a further independent parametric system. Numerical solutions of an equation system can be found with a precise and reliable adaptive random search. The OpenGL-viewer supports zooming, scaling, rotating and translating as well as filed lightning or surface properties. Special effects are transparency, textures, fog and motion blur.
You have up to eight independent lights or spotlights, background settings, miscellaneous wire-modes or global illumination models. Pictures are rendered as PNG, JPG, PDF or PostScript and can be of arbitrary size. For textures Zhu3D recognizes nine common formats. Isosurfaces you can be visualized with different volume-based algorithms.
Zhu3D runs under Linux/Unix, Windows 98-XP and Mac OS X and is localized for English, German and Spanish. It supports different CPU's as well as different API's like KDE, Motiv, Gnome or Windows. All settings can be changed dynamically at runtime. The application comes with extended help-files and a lot of examples.
COMPILING:
All you need is Qt 4.1 or later and support for OpenGL 1.2, what can be a software implementation like Mesa. The qmake easily can be taylored for special needs, what supports packagers.
HARDWARE:
For basic viewings even an old and slow PC without hardware accelerated OpenGL is sufficient. However, enabling goddies like animation, big textures and especially motion blur is a challenge for every GPU out there. On the other hand isosurfaces with dense meshes need a lot of CPU-power.
VERSIONS:
Whatever ends with an odd number, is considered as "pre". Those versions are not intended to be unfinished or buggy, but my testing capabilities are limited to my own HW/SW-configurations. So especially packagers may wait for an even number. This happens after a significant amount of downloads and no major problems reported. A complete Windows version is available - special thanks to Victor Fernandez, who is hosting this!
What's New in This Release:
Replaced recursive OpenGL-parser with the bytecode-version from Warp. With some additional tuning the average speed gain is between 300%-500%. Especially important for costly isosurfaces on slower machines
Raised upper limit for isosurface grid
The parser syntax changed slightly. E.g: 2X*SIN(XY) must be written as 2*x*sin(x*y) now
To stay compatible added all missing functions to the Warp-parser and introduced the $ sign for constants there
New parser functions are: floor(), ceil(), cot(), csc(), sec()
Added new functions to recursive parser, which is still in use for solving due to it's precision
In parameter mode the Z-grid buttons consequently are disabled now
Some code shrink measurements
Completely reworked examples for new syntax
Loading a zhu-file always starts with a blank viewer window now. This avoids worrying intermixing of old/new views during build up
Small changes in menu entries/GUI to reflect real meanings better
Improvements/updates for Chinese and French GUI-translation. Special thanks again to Yanqing and Henri Girard for maintaining this translations
Enabled the nicer Zhu3D-logo in GUI/menu entries too now
The combobox under "Settings/General/Language" did not retranslate it's own language entries immediately. Fixed
Clean ups in ./src for readability and unifications
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