viewwld - interactive 3D viewing program for Suns

[Mark Phillips]

I have developed an interactive graphics program for viewing 3-dimensional
line drawings that runs under Suntools on Sun workstations.  The program
is called 'viewwld' and has been in use in our department for several
months.  I plan to distribute it on the net, but before doing so I would
like for several more people out there to use it and give me some
feedback.  If you are interested in obtaining it (in source-code form with
instructions for compiling), you can

1. get it via anonymous ftp from poincare.geom.umn.edu (128.101.25.31);
it's in the pub directory (in the compressed tar file viewwld.tar.Z; get
the CONTENTS file for instructions).  

or 

2. send email to me (mbp at lakisis.umd.edu) and I will email it to you.

Viewwld will read an ascii input file containing a list of line segments
and points in space, and will then display the picture in a Suntools
window which has an interactive control panel for rotating, zooming in and
out, etc.  Viewwld is simple in that it only displays zero- and
one-dimensional data --- no shaded or hidden-line images of surfaces or
solids, etc.  Because of this simplicity, however, it is fast and works
well for conveying simple to moderately complicated spatial relationships.
It can also create PostScript output, and has controls for recording and
playing back "movies" consisting of sequences of (up to 30) bitmaps, which
gives it an almost real-time flavor on even the slowest of Suns.

I wrote viewwld on a Sun 3 running SunOS 3.5; I have also tested it on a
Sun 3 running SunOS 4.0. Although I have not tested it on any Sun 4's, as
far as I know it should work on them too.  (If not, please let me know!).

Mark Phillips			  mbp at lakisis.umd.edu   (arpanet)
Department of Mathematics         (301) 454-6550
University of Maryland	          
College Park, Maryland  20742