Graphics Muse Issue 18

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Set your browser to the width of the line below for best viewing.
© 1997 by

muse:

v; to become absorbed in thought
n; [ fr. Any of the nine sister goddesses of learning and the arts in Greek Mythology ]: a source of inspiration

elcome to the Graphics Muse! Why a "muse"? Well, except for the sisters aspect, the above definitions are pretty much the way I'd describe my own interest in computer graphics: it keeps me deep in thought and it is a daily source of inspiration.

[Graphics Mews] [Musings] [Resources]

his column is dedicated to the use, creation, distribution, and discussion of computer graphics tools for Linux systems. This month I'll finally get around to the article on HF-Lab, John Beale's wonderful tool for creating 3D Heightfields. I've been meaning to do this for the past few months. I made sure I made time for it this month.
The other article from me this month is a quick update on the 3D modellers that are available for Linux. I didn't really do a comparative review, it's more of a ``this is what's available, and this is where to find them''. A full comparative review is beyond the scope of this column. Perhaps I'll do one for the Linux Journal sometime in the future.
I had planned to do a preview of the Gimp 1.0 release which is coming out very soon. However, I'll be doing a full article on the Gimp for the November graphics issue of Linux Journal and decided to postpone the introduction I had planned for the Muse. At the same time I had decided to postpone my preview, Larry Ayers contacted me to see if I was still doing my Gimp article for the Muse. He had planned on doing one on the latest version but didn't want to clash with my article. I told him to feel free and do his since I wasn't doing one too. He has graciously offered to place the preview here in the Muse and it appears under the ``More Musings...'' section.

Disclaimer: Before I get too far into this I should note that any of the news items I post in this section are just that - news. Either I happened to run across them via some mailing list I was on, via some Usenet newsgroup, or via email from someone. I'm not necessarily endorsing these products (some of which may be commercial), I'm just letting you know I'd heard about them in the past month.

Zgv v2.8

Zgv is a graphic file viewer for VGA and SVGA displays which supports most popular formats. (It uses svgalib.) It provides a graphic-mode file selector to select file(s) to view, and allows panning and fit-to-screen methods of viewing, slideshows, scaling, etc.

Nothing massively special about this release, really, but some of the new features are useful, and there is an important bugfix.

New features added
PCX support. (But 24-bit PCXs aren't supported.)
Much faster generation of JPEG thumbnails, thanks to Costa Sapuntzakis.
Optionally ditch the logo to get a proper, full-screen selector, with `f' or `z', or with `fullsel on' in config file.
Thumbnail files can be viewed like other images, and thumbnail files are their own thumbnails - this means you can browse thumbnail directories even if you don't have the images they represent.
`-T' option, to echo tagged files on exit.

Bugfixes
Thumbnail create/update for read-only media and DOS filesystems fixed. It previously created all of them each time rather than only doing those necessary.
Fixed problem with uncleared display when switching from zoom mode to scaling up.
The switching-from-X etc. now works with kernel 2.0.x. Previously it hanged. (It should still work with 1.2.x, too.)
Now resets to blocking input even when ^C'ed.
Various documentation `bugs' fixed, e.g. the `c' and `n' keys weren't previously listed.

Other changes
ANSIfied the code. This caught a couple of (as it turned out) innocuous bugs. (Fortuitously, they had no ill effect in practice.)
Updated PNG support to work with libpng 0.81 (and, hopefully, any later versions).
Sped up viewing in 15/16-bit modes a little.
Incorporated Adam Radulovic's patch to v2.7 allowing more files in the directory and reducing memory usage.

Zgv can be found either in
sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/Incoming or
sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/graphics/viewers.
The files of interest are zgv2.8-src.tar.gz and zgv2.8-bin.tar.gz.

Editor's Note: I don't normally include packages that aren't X-based, but the number of announcements for this month were relatively small so I thought I'd go ahead and include this one. I don't plan on making it a practice, however.

Attention: OpenGL and Direct3D programmers

, author of OpenGL Programming for the X Window System, posted the following announcement on the comp.graphics.api.opengl newsgroup. I thought it might be of interest to at least a few of my readers.

The URL below explains a fast and effective technique for applying texture mapped text onto 3D surfaces. The full source code for a tool to generate texture font files (.txf files) and an API for easy rendering of the .txf files using OpenGL is provided.

For a full explanation of the technique including sample images showing how the technique works, please see:
http://reality.sgi.com/mjk_asd/
tips/TexFont/TexFont.html

Direct3D programmers are invited to see how easy and powerful OpenGL programming is. In fact, the technique demonstrated is not immediately usable on Direct3D because it uses intensity textures (I believe not in Direct3D), polygon offset, and requires alpha testing, alpha blending, and texture modulation (not required to be implemented by Direct3D). I mean this to be a constructive demonstration of the technical inadequacies of Direct3D.

I hope you find the supplied source code, texture font generation utility, sample .txf files, and explanation quite useful.

Note: for those that aren't aware of it, Direct3D is Microsoft's answer to OpenGL. Despite their original support of OpenGL, they aparently decided to go with a different 3D standard, one they invented (I think). Anyway, the discussion on comp.graphics.api.opengl of late has been focused on which of the two technologies is a better solution.

Epson PhotoPC and PhotoPC 500 digital cameras

Epson PhotoPC and PhotoPC 500 are digital still cameras. They are shipped with Windows and Mac based software to download the pictures and control the camera parameters over a serial port.

Eugene Crosser wrote a C library and a command-line tool to perform the same tasks under UNIX. See

ftp://ftp.average.org/pub/photopc/

MD5(photopc-1.0.tar.gz)= 9f286cb3b1bf29d08f0eddf2613f02c9

Eugene Crosser; 2:5020/230@fidonet; http://www.average.org/~crosser/

ImageMagick V3.8.5

Alexander Zimmerman has released a new version of ImageMagick. The announcment, posted to comp.os.linux.announce, reads as follows:

I just uploaded to sunsite.unc.edu
ImageMagick-3.8.5-elf.lsm
ImageMagick-3.8.5-elf.tgz

This is the newest version of my binary distribution of ImageMagick. It will move to the places listed in the LSM-entry at the end of this message. Please remember to get the package libIMPlugIn-1.1 too, to make it working.

This version brings together a number of minor changes made to accomodate PerlMagick and lots of minor bug fixes including multi-page TIFF decoding and writing PNG.

ImageMagick (TM), version 3.8.5, is a package for display and interactive manipulation of images for the X Window System. ImageMagick performs, also as command line programs, among others these functions:

Describe the format and characteristics of an image

Convert an image from one format to another

Transform an image or sequence of images

Read an image from an X server and output it as an image file

Animate a sequence of images

Combine one or more images to create new images

Create a composite image by combining several separate images

Segment an image based on the color histogram

Retrieve, list, or print files from a remote network site

ImageMagick also supports the Drag-and-Drop protocol from the OffiX package and many of the more popular image formats including JPEG, MPEG, PNG, TIFF, Photo CD, etc.

Primary-site: ftp.wizards.dupont.com /pub/ImageMagick/linux

986k ImageMagick-i486-linux-ELF.tar.gz

884k PlugIn-i486-linux-ELF.tar.gz

Alternate-site: sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/apps/graphics/viewers/X

986k ImageMagick-3.8.5-elf.tgz

1k ImageMagick-3.8.5-elf.lsm

sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/libs/graphics

884k libIMPlugIn-1.1-elf.tgz

1k libIMPlugIn-1.1-elf.lsm

Alternate-site: ftp.forwiss.uni-passau.de /pub/linux/local/ImageMagick

986k ImageMagick-3.8.5-elf.tgz

1k ImageMagick-3.8.5-elf.lsm

884k libIMPlugIn-1.1-elf.tgz

1k libIMPlugIn-1.1-elf.lsm

VARKON Version 1.15A

VARKON is a high level development tool for parametric CAD and engineering applications developed by Microform, Sweden. 1.15A includes new parametric functions for creation and editing of sculptured surfaces and rendering based on OpenGL.

Version 1.15A of the free version for Linux is now available for download at:
http://www.microform.se

Shared library version of xv 3.10a

xv-3.10a-shared is the familiar image viewer program with all current patches modified to use the shared libraries provided by libgr.

xv-3.10a-shared is available from ftp://ftp.ctd.comsat.com/pub/. libgr-2.0.12.tar.gz is available from ftp://ftp.ctd.comsat.com/pub/linux/ELF/.

t1lib-0.2-beta - A Library for generating Bitmaps from Adobe Type 1 Fonts

t1lib is a library for generating character- and string-glyphs from Adobe Type 1 fonts under UNIX. t1lib uses most of the code of the X11 rasterizer donated by IBM to the X11-project. But some disadvantages of the rasterizer being included in X11 have been eliminated. Here are the main features:

t1lib is completely independent of X11 (although the program provided for testing the library needs X11)
fonts are made known to library by means of a font database file at runtime
searchpaths for all types of input files are configured by means of a configuration file at runtime
characters are rastered as they are needed
characters and complete strings may be rastered by a simple function call
when rastering strings, pairwise kerning information from .afm-files may optionally be taken into account
an interface to ligature-information of afm-files is provided
rotation is supported at any angle
there's limited support for extending and slanting fonts
new encoding vectors may be loaded at runtime and fonts may be reencoded using these encoding vectors
antialiasing is implemented using three gray-levels between black and white
a logfile may be used for logging runtime error-, warning- and other messages
an interactive test program called "xglyph" is included in the distribution. This program allows to test all of the features of the library. It requires X11.

Author: Rainer Menzner ( )

You can get t1lib by anonymous ftp at:
ftp://ftp.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/
pub/software/t1lib/t1lib-0.2-beta.tar.gz

An overview of t1lib including some screenshots of xglyph can be found at:
http://www.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/
ini/PEOPLE/rmz/t1lib.html

Freetype Project - The Free TrueType Font Engine
Alpha Release 4

The FreeType library is a free and portable TrueType font rendering engine. This package, known as `Alpha Release 4' or `AR4', contains the engine's source code and documentation.

What you'll find in this release are:

better portability of the C code than in the previous release.
font smoothing, a.k.a. gray-level rendering. Just like Win95, only the diagonals and curves are smoothed, while the vertical and horizontal stems are kept intact.
support for all character mappings, as well as glyph indexing and translation functions (incomplete).
full-featured TrueType bytecode interpreter !! The engine is now able to hint the glyphs, thus producing an excellent result at small sizes. We now match the quality of the bitmaps generated by Windows and the Mac! Check the `view' test program for a demonstration.
loading of composite glyphs. It is now possible to load and display composite glyphs with the `zoom' test program. However, composite glyph hinting is not implemented yet due to the great incompleteness of the available TrueType specifications.

Also, some design changes have been made to allow the support of the following features, though they're not completely implemented yet:

multiple opened font instances
thread-safe library build
re-entrant library build
and of course, still more bug fixes ;-)

Source is provided in two programming languages: C and Pascal, with some common documentation and several test programs. The Pascal source code has been successfully compiled and run with Borland Pascal 7 and fPrint's Virtual Pascal on DOS and OS/2, respectively. The C source code has been successfully compiled and run on various platforms including DOS, OS/2, Amiga, Linux and several other variants of UNIX. It is written in ANSI C and should be very easily ported to any platform. Though development of the library is mainly performed on OS/2 and Linux, the library does not contain system-specific code. However, this package contains some graphics drivers used by the test programs for display purposes on DOS, OS/2, Amiga and X11.

Finally, the FreeType Alpha Release 4 is released for informative and demonstration purpose only. The authors provide it `as is', with no warranty.

The file freetype-AR4.tar.gz (about 290K) is available now at ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/X11/fonts or at the FTP site in: ftp://ftp.physiol.med.tu-muenchen.de/pub/freetype

Web page:
http://www.physiol.med.tu-muenchen.de/~robert/freetype.html
The home site of the FreeType project is
ftp://ftp.physiol.med.tu-muenchen.de/pub/freetype
There is also a mailing list:

Send the usual subscription commands to:

Copyright 1996	David Turner
Copyright 1997	Robert Wilhelm
Copyright 1997	Werner Lemberg

Did You Know?

...the Portal web site for xanim has closed down. The new primary sites are:

http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/home.html
http://smurfland.cit.buffalo.edu/xanim/home.html
http://www.tm.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/xanim/
The latest revision of xanim is 2.70.6.4.

I got the following message from a reader. Feel free to contact him with your comments. I have no association with this project.

I'm currently working on an application to do image processing and Computer Vision tasks. In the stage of development, I would like to know what the community expects from such a product, so if you would like the status of the work, please come and visit:
http://www-vision.deis.unibo.it/~cverond/cvw
Expecially the "sample" section, where you can see some of the application's functionality at work, and leave me a feedback. Thanks for your help. Cristiano Verondini

Q and A

Q: Can someone point me to a good spot to download some software to make a good height map?

A: I'd suggest you try either John Beale's hflab available at: http://shell3.ba.best.com/~beale/ Look under sources. You will find executables for Unix and source code for other systems. It is pretty good at manipulating and creating heightfields and is great at making heightfields made in a paint program more realistic.
For the ultimate in realism use dem2pov by Bill Kirby, also available at John Beale's web site to convert DEM files to TGA heightfields. You can get DEM files trough my DEM mapping project at http://www.sn.no/~svalstad/hf/dem.html or directly from ftp://edcftp.cr.usgs.gov/pub/data/DEM/250/
As for your next question about what the pixel values of heightfields mean, there are three different situations:

High quality heightfields use a 24bit TGA or PNG file to store 16 bit values with the most significant byte in the red component, the least significant byte in the green component and the blue component empty.
8bit GIF files store a colour index where the colour with index number 0 becomes the lowest part of the heightfield and the colour with index number 255 becomes the highest part.
8bit greyscale GIF files; the darkest colours become the lowest part of the heightfield and the lightest colours becomes the higherst part.

From Stig M. Valstad via the IRTC-L mailing list

http://www.sn.no/~svalstad

Q: Sorry to pester you but I've read your minihowto on graphics in Linux and I still haven't found what I'm looking for. Is there a tool that will convert a collection of TGA files to one MPEG file in Linux?

A: I don't know of any offhand, but check the following pages. They might have pointers to tools that could help.

http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/multimedia/animation/mpeg/berkeley-mirror/ http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/home.html (this is Xanim's home page). You probably have to convert your TGA's to another format first, then encode them with mpeg_encode (which can be found at the first site listed above).

Q: Where can I find some MPEG play/encode tools?

A: http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/multimedia/animation/mpeg/berkeley-mirror/

Q: Where can I find free textures on the net in BMP, GIF, JPEG, and PNG formats?

A: Try looking at:
http://axem2.simplenet.com/heading.htm

These are the textures I've started using in my OpenGL demos. They are very professional. There are excellent brick and stone wall textures. If you are doing a lot of modeling of walls and floors and roads, the web site offers a CD-ROM with many more textures.

Generally, I load them into "xv" (an X image viewer utility) and resample them with highest-quality filtering to be on even powers of two and then save them as a TIFF file. I just wish they were already at powers of two so I didn't have to resample.

Then, I use Sam Leffler's very nice libtiff library to read them into my demo. I've got some example code of loading TIFF images as textures at:
http://reality.sgi.com/mjk_asd/tiff_and_opengl.html

From: Mark Kilgard <>, author of OpenGL Programming for the X Window System, via the comp.graphics.api.opengl newsgroup.

Q: Why can't I feed the RIB files exported by AMAPI directly into BMRT?

A: According to :

Thomas Burge from Apple who has both the NT and Apple versions of AMAPI explained to me what the situation is - AMAPI only exports RIB entity files; you need to add a fair chunk of data before a RIB WorldBegin statement to get the camera in the right place and facing the right way. As it were, no lights were enabled and my camera was positioned underneath the object, facing down! There is also a Z-axis negation problem in AMAPI, which this gentleman pointed out to me and gave me to the RIB instructions to compensate for it.

Q: Is there an OpenGL tutorial on-line? The sample code at the OpenGl WWW center seems pretty advanced to me.

A: There are many OpenGL tutorials on the net. Try looking at:
http://reality.sgi.com/mjk_asd/opengl-links.html

Some other good ones are:

OpenGL overview - http://www.sgi.com/Technology/openGL/paper.design/opengl.html
OpenGL with Visual C++ - http://www.iftech.com/oltc/opengl/opengl0.stm
OpenGL and X, an intro - http://www.sgi.com/Technology/openGL/mjk.intro/intro.html

From Mark Kilgard

Q: So, like, is anyone really reading this column?

A: I have no idea. Is anyone out there?

3D Modellers Update

Recently there has been a minor explosion of 3D modellers. Most of the modellers I found the first time out are still around, although some are either no longer being developed or the developers have not released a new version in awhile. Since I haven't really covered the range of modellers in this column since I started back in November 1996, I decided it was time I provided a brief overview of what's available and where to get them.
The first thing to do is give a listing of what tools are available. The following is the list of modellers I currently know about, in no particular order:

AC3D
SCED/SCEDA
Midnight Modeller
AMAPI
Bentley Microstation 95

Aero
Leo3D
MindsEye
3DOM

There is also the possibility that bCAD is available for Linux as a commercial port, but I don't have proof of this yet. Their web site is very limited as to contact information, so I wasn't able to send them email to find out for certain. The web pages at 3DSite for bCAD do not list any Unix ports for bCAD, although they appear to have a command line renderer for Unix.
There are also a couple of others I'm not sure how to classify, but the modelling capabilities are not as obvious so I'll deal with them in a future update (especially if they contact me with details on their products).
All of these use graphical, point-and-click style interfaces. Other modellers use programming languages but no graphical interface, such as POV-Ray, Megahedron and BMRT (via its RenderMan support). Those tools are not covered by this discussion.
The list of modellers can be broken into three categories: stable, under development, and commercial. The stable category includes AC3D, SCED/SCEDA, and Midnight Modeller. Commercial modellers are the AMAPI and Megahedron packages, and Bentley Microstation. The latter is actually free for non-commercial unsupported use, or $500 with support. Below are short descriptions of the packages, their current or best known status and contact information. The packages in the table are listed alphabetically.

Product and description
Imports	Exports	Availability	Contact

3DOM - Very early development. I haven't tried this one yet.
Unknown	Unknown	Freeware	http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/cwis/research/graphics/3DOM/

AC3D - OpenGL based vertex modeller with multiple, editable views plus a 3D view. Includes ability to move, rotate, resize, position, and extrude objects. Objects can be named and hidden. Includes support for 2D (line (both poly and polylines) , circle, rectangle, ellipse, and disk) and 3D (box, sphere, cylinder and mesh). Fairly nice 3D graphical interface that looks like Motif but doesn't require Motif libraries.
Imports DXF, Lightwave, Triangle, vector formatted object files.	Generates RenderMan, POV-Ray 2.2, VRML, Massive, DVS, Dive and Triangle formatted object files.	Shareware	http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ computing/users/andy/ac3dlinux.html

Aero - The following is taken from the documentation that accompanies the package: AERO is a tool for editing and simulating scenes with rigid body systems. You can use the built-in 4-view editor to create a virtual scene consisting of spheres, cuboids, cylinders, planes and fix points. You can link these objects with rods, springs, dampers and bolt joints and you can connect forces to the objects. Then you can begin the simulation and everything starts moving according to the laws of physics (gravitation, friction, collisions). The simulation can be viewed as animated wire frame graphics. In addition you can use POV-Ray to render photo-realistic animation sequences. This package requires the FSF Widget library, which I don't have. The last time I tried to compile that library it didn't work for me, but maybe the build process works better now. Anyway, I haven't seen this modeller in action.
Proprietary ASCII text format	POV-Ray		http://www.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/ipvr/bv/aero/ ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/AERO

AMAPI - Fairly sophisticated, including support for NURBS and a macro language. Interface is quit unique for X applications, probably based on OpenGL. The version available from Sunsite doesn't work quite right on my system. Some windows don't get drawn unless a refresh is forced and the method for doing a refresh is kind of trial-and-error. The trial version of 2.11 has the same problem. Perhaps this is a problem with the OpenGL they use, although a check with ldd doesn't show any dependencies on OpenGL. I wish this worked. I really like the interface. Yonowat, the maker of AMAPI, has a trial version, 2.11, available for download from their web site. They are also porting another of their products AMAPI Studio 3.0, a more advanced modeling tool, to Linux. The web site doesn't mention when it might be ready but the description on the pages look very interesting.
DXF, 3DS R3 and R4, IGES, Illustrator, Text, has its own proprietary format	DXF, CADRender, Text, AMAPI, 3DS R3 and R4, Ray Dream Designer, Lightwave, 3DGF, Truespace V2.0, Caliray, POV 3.0, IGES, Explore, VRML, STL, Illustrator, RIB	Shareware - $25US, $99US will get you a 200 page printed manual. Personal use copies for Linux are free for a year, but commercial, government, and institutional users must register their copies.	http://www.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/ipvr/bv/aero/ ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/AERO

Leo3D - The following is taken from the README file in the Leo3D distribution: Leo 3D is a real time 3D modelling application which enables you to create realistic 3D scenes using different rendering applications (such as Povray or BMRT for example). It also exports VRML files. What distinguishes Leo 3D from most other modelling applications is that all object transformations are done directly in the viewing window (no need for three seperate x, y, and z windows). For example, to move an object, all you need to do is grab and drag (with the mouse) one of the 'blue dots' which corresponds to the 2D Plane for which you wish to move the object. Scaling and rotation is done in the same way with the yellow and magenta dots respectively. This modeller has a very cool interface based on OpenGL, GLUT, TCL and Tix. I had problems with it when trying to load files, but just creating and shading a few objects was quite easy and rather fun, actually. This modeller certainly has some of the most potential of the non-commercial modellers that I've seen. However, it still has some work to do to fix a few obvious bugs.
DXF	POV-Ray, RenderMan, VRML 1.0, JPEG	Shareware - $25US	ftp://s2k-ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/personal/mallekai/leo3d.html (Yes, that's an ftp site with an HTML page.)

Bentley Microstation 95 and MasterPiece - Commercial computer-aided design product for drafting, design, visualization, analysis, database management, and modeling with a long history on MS, Mac and other Unix platforms. Includes programming support with a BASIC language and linkages to various commericial databases such as Oracle and Informix. The product seems quite sophisticated based on their web pages, but I've never seen it in action. I have seen a number of texts at local bookstores relating to the MS products, so I have a feeling the Linux ports should be quite interesting. Bentley's product line is quite large. This looks like the place to go for a commercial modeller, although I'm not certain if they'll sell their educational products to the general public or not. If anyone finds out please let me know. Note that the Linux ports have not been released (to my knowledge - I'm going by what's on the web pages).
DXF, DWG and IGES	Unknown	Commercial, primarily targeted at educational markets, however they appear open to public distributions and ports of their other packages if enough interest is shown by the Linux community.	http://www.bentley.com/ema/academic/aclinux.htm http://www.bentley.com/ema/academic/academic.htm

Midnight Modeller - A direct port of the DOS version to Linux. The X interface looks and acts just like the DOS version. On an 8 bit display the colors are horrid, but it's not so bad on 24 bit displays. It seems to have a problem seeing all the directories in the current directory when trying to open files. The DOS version is being ported to Windows but it doesn't appear a port of this version will be coming for Linux. The original Linux-port author says he's still interested in doing bug fixes but doesn't expect to be doing any further feature enhancement.
DXF, Raw	DXF, Raw	Freeware	ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/.mirror1/ sunsite/apps/graphics/rays/pov/ mnm-linux-pl2.static.ELF.gz ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/.mirror1/ sunsite/apps/graphics/rays/pov/ mnm-linux-pl2.static.ELF.gz Author: Michael Lamertz <>

MindsEye - MindsEye - A new modeller in very early development which is based on both OpenGL/MesaGL and QT. Is designed to allow plug-ins. The project has a mailing list for developers and other interested parties and appears to have more detailed design specifications than most "community developed" projects of this nature. It's been a while coming, but the modeller is starting to take shape. Last I looked they were beginning to work on adding autoconf to the build environment, which is a very good thing to do early on in a project, like this one is.
DXF, others planned	Unknown	GNU GPL	http://www.ptf.hro.nl/free-d/ - Web Site ftp://ftp.cs.umn.edu/users/mein/mindseye/ - source code

SCED/SCEDA - The following is taken from the README file in the SCED distribution:

Sced is a program for creating 3d scenes, then exporting them to a wide variety of rendering programs. Programs supported are: POVray, Rayshade, any VRML browser, anything that reads Pixar's RIB format, and Radiance. Plus a couple of local formats, for me.
Sced uses constraints to allow for the accurate placement of objects, and provides a maintenance system for keeping this constraints satisfied as the scene is modified.

This is a very sophisticated modeller, but the Athena interface makes it look less powerful than it is. I used this modeller for many of the scenes I created when I first started into 3D and still like its constraint system better than what is available in AC3D (which doesn't really have constraints in same sense, I don't think). SCED's biggest limitation is its lack of support for importing various 3D formats.

SCEDA is a port of SCED that allows for keyframed animation. Objects are given initial and ending positions and the modeller creates the frames that will fill in the spaces between these two points.

Proprietary scene format and OFF (wireframe format)

POV 3.0, Radiance, RenderMan, VRML 1.0

Freeware (GPL'd)

http://http.cs.berkeley.edu/~schenney/sced/sced.html
ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/stephen/sced
ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/pov/modellers/sced

HF-Lab

Height fields are convenient tools for representing terrain data that are supported directly by POV-Ray and through the use of displacement maps or patch meshes in BMRT. With POV-Ray and displacement maps in BMRT, a 2D image is used to specify the height of a point based on the color and/or intensity level for the point in the 2D image. The renderer uses this image, mapped over a 3D surface, to create mountains, valleys, plateaus and other geographic features. Creating a representative 2D image is the trick to realistic landscapes. HF-Lab, an X-based interactive tool written by , is an easy to use and extremely useful tool for creating these 2D images.
Once you have retrieved the source, built (instructions are included and the build process is fairly straightforward, although it could probably benefit from the use of imake or autoconf) and installed it, you're ready to go. HF-Lab is a command line oriented tool that provides its own shell from which commands can be entered. To start HF-Lab using BASH type

% export HFLHELP=$HOME/hf/hf-lab.hlp
% hlx

and in csh type

% setenv HFLHELP $HOME/hf/hf-lab.hlp
% hlx

Note that the path you use for the HFHELP environment variable depends on where you installed the hf-lab.hlp file from the distribution. The build process does not provide a method for installing this file for you so you'll need to be sure to move the file to the appropriate directory by hand. You definitely want to make sure this file is properly installed since the online help features in HF-Lab are quite nice.
The first thing you notice is the shell prompt. From the prompt you type in one or more commands that manipulate the current height field (there can be more than one, each of which occupies a place on the stack). We've started by using the online help feature. Typing help by itself brings up the list of available commands, categorized by type. Typing help <command> (without the brackets, of course) gets you help on a particular command. In Figure 1 the help for the crater command is shown.
Now lets look at the available features. John writes in the documentation that accompanies the source:

HF-Lab commands fall into several categories: those for generating heightfields (HFs), combining or transforming them, and viewing them are the three most important. Then there are other 'housekeeping' commands to move HFs around on the internal stack, load and save them on the disk, and set various internal variables.

Generating HFs are done with one of gforge, random, constant, and zero. The first of these, gforge, is the most interesting as it will create fractal-based fields. Random creates a field based on noise patterns (lots of spikes, perhaps usable as grass blades up close in a rendered scene) while constant and zero create level planes. Zero is a just a special case of constant where the height value is 0.
Each HF that is generated gets placed on the stack. The stack is empty to start. Running one of the HF generation commands will add a HF to top of the stack. By default there are 4 slots in the stack that can be filled, but this number can be changed using the set stacksize command. The HFs on the stack can be popped, swapped, duplicated, and named and the whole stack can be rotated. Also, rotation can be between the first 3 HFs on the stack.
The normal proces for creating a HF usually includes the following steps:

Generate one or two HFs with gforge
Manipulate the HFs with the crater or pow commands.
View the HF in 3D.
Manipulate some more.
Check it again.
Continue, ad infinitum.

Manipulating a HF can be done in several ways. First, there are a set of commands to operate on a single HF, the One HF-Operators. A few of the more interesting of these are the pow, zedge, crater, fillbasin, and flow commands. Zedge flattens the edges of the HF (remember that a HF is really just a 3D representation of a 2D image, and those images are rectangular). Crater adds circular craters to the HF of various radii and depths. Fillbasin and

-Top of next column-

More Musings...
Gimp 1.0 - Larry Ayers provides a preview of the newest version of the Unix worlds answer to Adobe Photoshop.

flow can be used together to etch out river valleys. There are examples, erosion1.scr and erosion2.jpg in the distribution which show this.
There are two ways to view the images you create with HF-Lab from within the application. One is to view the 2D greyscale image that will be saved to file. Viewing the 2D image is done with the show command. The other method is as an representative rendering of the HF in 3D, so that you'll get a better idea of what the final rendering will be with POV or BMRT. Viewing the 3D images is done in a secondary shell (although it is also possible to simply ask that shell to display the image and return immediately to the command shell - this is probably what you'll do once you've gotten more experienced with HF-Lab). The view command enters the user into the 3D viewing shell. From here you can set the level of detail to show, the position of a lightsource or the cameras eye, lighten, darken, tile and change the scale of the display. To exit the secondary shell, simply type quit.
HF-Lab supports a number of different file formats for reading and writing: PNG, GIF, POT, TGA, PGM, MAT, OCT, and RAW. Most of these formats have special purposes, but for use with POV-Ray and BMRT you should save files in TGA format. POV-Ray can use this format directly, but for use with BMRT you will need to convert the TGA image to TIFF format. Using TGA allows you to save the image information without data loss and conversion from TGA to TIFF is relatively easy using XV, NetPBM, or ImageMagick.
Since creating a reasonably realistic HF can be a long session of trial and error you may find it useful to use the builtin scripting capability. John provides a very good set of sample scripts along with the source. A quick glance at one of these, erosion1.scr, shows that multiple commands can be run at a time. This is also possible from the HF> prompt, so you can try these commands one at a time to see what effect each has. Once you have a rough guess as the to process you need to create the scene you want, you should place this in a script and then edit the script to get the detail level desired.
HF-Lab creates its images through the use of lots of mathematical tricks that are far beyond the scope of this column. I'd love to say I understand all of them, but I only have a limited understanding of fractals and their use in creating terrain maps and I have no real understanding of Fast Fourier Transforms or Inverse Fast Fourier Transforms. These latter two are methods of filtering a HF in order to smooth or sharpen features. Filters include a high pass filter (hpfilter), low pass filter (lpfilter), band pass filter (bpfilter) and band reject filter (brfilter). Although I don't understand the math behind them, I was able to use a High Pass Filter to take a simple gforge-created HF and turn it into a very nice heightfield that simulates a leathery surface. This HF was created in only two steps:

gforge 400 2.2
hpfilter 0.095 30

So, you can see how powerful this tool can be. Using height fields in BMRT, or as bump maps in POV, can produce some very interesting textures!
There are many other features of HF-Lab which I have not covered. And in truth, I really didn't give much detail on the features I did discuss. John gives much better descriptions of some of the features in the README file that accompanies the source and I highly recommend you read this file while you experiment with HF-Lab for the first few times. He has gone to great lengths to provide very useful online help and sample scripts. The interface may not be point-and-click, but it certainly is not difficult to learn.
When I first came across John Beale and HF-Lab I was quite impressed with its ease of use for creating interesting landscapes. I haven't really used it much since the early days of my 3D rendering lifetime, but since writing this article I've rediscovered how powerful this tool can be. Originally I viewed the tool only as a tool for creating landscapes, ie as a tool for modelling a world. Now I see how it can be used to create surface features of all kinds that can be used as textures and not just models. I think I'll be making more use of this tool in the future.

The following links are just starting points for finding more information about computer graphics and multimedia in general for Linux systems. If you have some application-specific information for me, I'll add them to my other pages or you can contact the maintainer of some other web site. I'll consider adding other general references here, but application or site-specific information needs to go into one of the following general references and will not be listed here.

Linux Graphics mini-Howto
Unix Graphics Utilities
Linux Multimedia Page

Some of the mailing lists and newsgroups I keep an eye on, where I get alot of the information for this column:

The Gimp User and Gimp Developer Mailing Lists.
The IRTC-L discussion list
comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing
comp.graphics.rendering.renderman
comp.graphics.api.opengl
comp.os.linux.announce

Future Directions

Next month:

BMRT Part 3: Advanced Topics or a short tutorial on writing an OpenGL application. I'm currently working on a little Motif/OpenGL application which I plan on using to create models for use with BMRT. I'd like to finish it before I return to BMRT, but I have promised the third part on BMRT for July. I'm not sure which I'll get to, especially since I also have an article for Linux Journal due July 1st.
..and who knows what else