SSP Project Summary | |
Each of the previous projects was visualised with a tailor-made solution using either AVS or OpenGL. Although AVS is very flexible, it is rather heavyweight for the straightforward task of rendering simple particles, and it is not easy to do real-time animation with many particles. OpenGL is a simple, portable and efficient standard for 3D graphics (and actually underlies AVS), available on Unix and NT, which is ideal for animation. The aim of this project is to develop a simple OpenGL visualiser for DEMs that reads a file containg the particle positions as a function of time and animates them. There are many possibilities for adding interesting functionality, for example: colour-coding the particles based on static or dynamic properties; leaving streamlines to track a particle's motion; taking cuts through the data to reveal inner structure; presenting the visualisation from the point of view of one of the particles; adding visualisation of bonds; etc. etc. An important by-product will be to develop more experience of OpenGL within EPCC, and to make use of our visualisation hardware.
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