Zhu3D

Zhu3D is an interactive OpenGL-based mathematical function viewer. You can visualize explicite functions, parametric systems and isosurfaces. The viewer supports zooming, scaling and rotating as well as filed lighting or surface properties. Special effects are animation, morphing, transparency, textures, fog and motion blur. Equation systems can be solved with a fast adaptive random search.

You have up to 8 lights, background settings, wire-modes or different illumination models. For picture rendering and textures all common pic-formats are recognized. You can define your own customized functions to any desired complexity level, nested or even recursive functions inclusively. For special purposes if-clauses and boolean operators are supported. Isosurfaces can use different volume-based algorithms.

Zhu3D is originally designed for *nix-systems, but runs as well under Mac OS X or Windows 2000-Vista in all 32/64 bit-flavours. It is fully localized for English, German, Spanish, French and Chinese and partially for Czech (Gui only). API's like KDE, Gnome, Motif, Mac OS or Windows XP/Vista are supported natively. All these settings as well as most others can be changed dynamically at runtime. The application comes with extended help files and a lot of examples. A precompiled and ready-to-go Windows version is available.

HARDWARE:

For basic tasks even a really slow and ancient PC without HW-OpenGL may be sufficient. However, neat things like motion blur, morphing or isosorfaces are a challenge for every GPU/CPU out there. Zhu3D automatically utilizes up to 16 highly optimized parallel threads therefore. When compiling by yourself, you easely can enable vectorizing with SSE3 as an additional boost-option.

COMPILING:

All unnecessary dependencies are strictly avoided. So compiling is a mere child's play at your fingertips. Everything you need is Qt >=4.3 and OpenGL >=1.4 whereas OpenGL may even be a pure software implementation like Mesa. The qmake easily can be taylored for special needs, what supports packagers.


Have fun, Heinz van Saanen

What is new in 4.2.6

- Removed loading of real ancient Zhu3D-files
- Workaround for 'gluPerspective' error in Qt4 4.8.4
- Fixed compile error on older Suse/Mandriva i686. Special thanks to Pavel for reports
- Fixed tsc-compile error on older Mandriva i686. Special thanks to Pavel for reports
- Fixed tsc-compile error on newest ICC
- Improved Makefile for compilations for newer Intel ICC
- Improved Czech translation. Special thanks to Pavel
- Cosmetic improvements/updates or typo-fixes elsewhere

What was new in 4.2.4

- Fixed a very unlikely but possible memory-bug in the XML-file saving/loading-part
- Fixed a very unlikely but possible memory-leak in speedit.cpp
- Fixes for the timestamp-counter on newer platforms
- Slightly optimized some default window positions after the 1.st start ever
- Made settings-stuff more elegant throughout the code what shrinks the executable size too
- Enabled strip option -s as default compiler switch, what leads to slightly smaller executables
- Disabled senseless -ffast-math switch for GCC
- Switched icons to more modern KDE4-style where this seems optically feasible and consistent
- Cosmetic improvements/updates or typo-fixes elsewhere