Minneview for large patches and on RS-6000

[slevy]

It looks as though MinneView for the RS-6000 has been lost in the mist --
there was a partly-functional version at one time, but we didn't have a copy,
and the people who did haven't been able to find it.  A sufficiently interested
person could re-do the port; basically MinneView was functional once it
compiled.  If you are enthusiastic about trying this, we can send you
the source on condition you don't bug us about it.

We hear that someone is building a version of the FORMS library for the
RS-6000.  That's the main obstacle to porting geomview now (or rather
for someone else to port it, as we have no RS-6000's here).

I've made a version of MinneView which accepts Bezier patches up to
degree 16.  You can find it up for anonymous FTP from geom.umn.edu as
pub/MinneView-0.3.tar.Z.  To allow specifying patches with degree > 9,
a new Bezier header format is allowed:

	BEZ <u-degree> <v-degree> <dimension>

e.g. a non-rational bicubic patch could have a header of
	BEZ333		(old format)
or equivalently
	BEZ 3 3 3	(new format)

This format is documented only in this mail message.  It's accepted
at present only by the new MinneView, not by geomview.
Basically you're on your own.

    Stuart


> From lu at berlioz.crs4.it Wed Sep  9 07:54:32 1992
> Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 14:52:20 +0200
> From: Luigi.Niolu at berlioz.crs4.it
> To: software@geom
> 
> 
> We need to visualize Bezier patches with more than seven control
> points, that's usual in car projects; Geomview is setted to get 
> at most seven control points. To solve this problem we modified
> the constant MAX_BEZ_DEGREE defined in include/bezier.h and in
> src/lib/gprim/bezier/bezier.h setting its value to 12. With
> this modify Geomview appears to work correctly with patches
> having a degree higher than 6. If there are no troubles that, 
> at the moment, we don't see, it would be useful to other people
> putting this modify in the distributed source and executable.
> 
> Is it possible to obtain a Minneview executable with the same
> modify (for Stereo view)?
> 
> Like I told in the previous mail, we are interested to use
> Minneview in other than SGI machines having GL. Is it possible?
> 
> Thank you
> 
> Luigi Niolu