[Update REQ 6843]: Slicer

[munzner at cs.stanford.edu]

> First off, I have used geomview pretty extensively for the last five
> years and find it to be excellent software. Great job!

Great, nice to hear :)

> I am the chief research scientist for a small geophysical service
> compony in Houston- working mainly on porting our efforts to 3D.
> 
> Until very recently all my rendering needs have been met with the
> standard objects available -- like meshes and coffs. I am now involved
> in examining some volume data, however, and would like some pointers to
> what any of you may use for the folowing types of rendering:
> 
>     1. slicing volume data. Has anyone built a module that can do
> slicing on the fly--give volume data and have it construct meshes on
> orthogonal planes (or better yet any planes)? The ability to "slide" the
> slice plane would be very convenient.
> 
>     2. isosurfaces. Ive spent some time poking around for a good
> implementation. I settled for marching cubes but again- has anyone wired
> a module for this?
> 
> I would very much appreciate any assistance in this area. I am not
> requesting that anyone write code, just pass on any pointers to
> resources that may be appropriate.

The short answer is that I don't think anyone has written such things
for Geomview, but there are a lot of volume data tools for
constructing isosurfaces and such as part of vtk, a free package
available at 

http://www.kitware.com/vtk.html

I've thought about integrating Geomview with vtk, but have never had
time to do so. It should be possible, though. You could certainly
write an external modules which used some of the vtk classes to do
your volumetric computations and then spit out the results to
Geomview. 

> One last thing: A couple years ago I wrote a Java KeyFrame animator for
> geomview. It allows specification of rotation angles, scaling,
> addition/deletion of geometry objects, and dumping frames. I attach a
> screengrab. I use it quite often to produce animations and it is fairly
> robust although by no means polished. Is there any repository for such
> contrib code that someone else may find useful?

Cool. There isn't a place now, but I've been meaning for years to
create one since you're definitely not the only person who's used
Geomview. Your note is the impetus to finally act on this. I
volunteeer to create and maintain such a page - we just need to decide
amongst ourselves where to put it since the Geometry Center has pretty
much closed down. Mark, is it OK with you if I put this on the GC
site?

Tamara