ANNOUNCE:GLView 2.02 a new WIN VRML OpenGL Browser

Holger Grahn ([email protected])
Fri, 24 Nov 1995 23:07:39 +0000


Announcing GLView 2.0, the worlds first Shareware VRML Browser
for Windows 95 and Windows NT.

GLView uses Microsoft OpenGL for rendering, meaning support
for *all* display modes from 16 and 256 to True-Color
and support for 3D engine boards (e.g. Glint or others).

Available at:
http://www.snafu.de/~hg

GLView provides more features than any other VRML browser (at least currently):
- import of RAW, GEO, Wavefront OBJ (f) and AutoCad DXF files.
- export of RAW, GEO, STL, VRML (single object) files
- support for SFImage, SGI RGB, DIB/BMP, Targa, Jpeg and GIF texture image formats.
- simple VRML object/material/texture animations using experimental VRML extensions nodes
Rotor, Shuttle, Blinker, TextureRotor
- supports 3D extruded VRML text
- 3D morphing of arbitrary VRML indexFaceSets (e.g. a cow becomes a sphere).
- detailed camera control including near and far clipping planes and view angle
- many viewstyles from shaded, bounding-boxes to lighted/textured/antialiased wiessrame
- for portability from Inventor, most Inventor Geometry nodes are supported.
- support for all special things like multiple emissive indexed
face/vertex materials, LOD, WWWAnchor and camera switching, viewpoints, texture transforms ...
automatic triangulation of indexed faces sets ....

For VRML Authors there are other features of interest like
- collapsing an entire VRML Scene-Tree to a single (triangulated) IndexedFaceSet
- Material-Editor
- special TextureCoordinate generation functions (e.g. sphere/cylinder projection)
- cesation of 3D Text logos from arbitrary True-Type fonts
- 3D-file conversion

For a GL techie GLView allows access to low-level OpenGL options like
- Texture filtering rules (e.g. mip-mapping, bilinear)
- Fog
- OpenGL pixelformats, triangle strip construction
- OpenGL extension functions
- srame rate display ....

The next versions will probably bring :
a Python script language VRML extension, 3D Particle Systems, some VRML scene editing,
a VRML NodeInterpolator for camera animations and texture/material blending.
e.g. to animate Material over time using some keysrames:
NodeInterpolator { # interpolate all child nodes and traverses the resulting in-between node
<options>
speed 5.0 # once cyle in 5 seconds
Material{}
Material{}
Material{}
...
}

I hope you will have fun with GLView,
thanks for the help with Netscape DDE to the VRML mailing list.

HG
###################################################
Holger Grahn
[email protected] http://www.snafu.de/~hg


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