Some 3D Graphics Stuff

I've been working with Silicon Graphics machines for a long time now, first programming in Iris GL, then OpenGL and Inventor, and recently VRML2.

Here's an image I made from some Astrophysics data. It is a visualization of a simulation of the Universe, showing three separate isosurfaces of galactic density, in a 600 Mega-parsec cube. A 20-Mpc Gaussian smoothing was applied to the raw values (128^3 data-points). The isosurfaces are at the 7-, 50-, and 93-percentile densities (red, yellow, and green respectively). A big (512x512) version of this image is here.

Here are some simple example OpenGL programs, that I've put together for our CIV301 class. They use a small library of window-management routines, called the "PGL Library", to hide some of the more gratuitously messy, necessary X11 code. I wrote this library. You can download the PGL header file and the PGL library source. You may also find this useful: a PGL overview, which includes most of the source code. This library is currently installed on the MECA workstations, and may be used by compiling with the options "-I/usr/meca/include -L/usr/meca/lib -lpgl". Contact me for more info.

The Piero Project. is an integrated 3D visualization and Oracle database of Art History stuff centered around Piero della Francesca's Cycle of the True Cross, in Arezzo, Italy.

Be sure to check out the Interactive Campus History project! I've been writing the graphics software for this project. We're building a "virtual reality" version of the Princeton University campus, where you'll be able to pick any point in time, and walk through the campus as it existed at that time, and learn about the architectural and cultural history of campus, and the various buildings.

If you have a VRML viewer, you can view the following 3-D scenes. These are things that I've created, or helped other people with. Hopefully, I'll keep adding to this list. These are best viewed with Cosmo Player.

My VRML Worlds:

To learn more about SGI's OpenInventor toolkit, go to the Inventor thread of SGI's Silicon Surf web.

To learn more about VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language), go to the VRML Page.