Vis5D

Introduction

Vis5D is a system for interactive visualization of large 5-D gridded data sets such as those made by numeric weather models. One can make isosurfaces, contour line slices, colored slices, volume renderings, etc of data in a 3-D grid then rotate and animate the image in real time. There's also a feature for wind/trajectory tracing, a way to make text anotations for publications, etc.

Here's a screen shot of Vis5D:

Click here or here for more sample images.

Vis5D was written by the Visualization Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) by Bill Hibbard and Brian Paul with the help of:

Andre Battaiola of CPTEC, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Dave Santek of the SSEC
Marie-Francoise Voidrot-Martinez of the French Meteorology Office.
Dave Kamins and Jeff Vroom of Stellar Computer, Inc.
Simon Baas and Hans de Jong of the Netherlands for the HP/VOGL port
Pratish Shah of Kubota Computer for the Kubota port
Mike Stroyan of HP for the PEX support

The development of Vis5D was supported by the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center

System Requirements

Vis5D 4.2, the most recent version, works with the following systems:

Silicon Graphics workstations with IRIX 4.x or later. Multiple CPUs are used when present.
IBM RS/6000 workstations with AIX 3 or later. OpenGL-based 3-D hardware is supported.
Sun workstations with SunOS 5.x or later.
HP workstations with HP-UX A.09.01 or later. PEX-based 3-D hardware is supported.
DEC Alpha workstations with OSF/1 V1.3 or later.
IBM PC compatibles with Linux v1.2 or later. 90MHz Pentium or faster CPU recommended.

Notes:

At least 32 MB of RAM is recommended in all cases.
At least 8-bit color is needed, 24-bit color is recommended.
On systems without 3-D hardware rendering is done in software with the Mesa library. 3-D graphics hardware is highly recommended.

The size of your memory determines the size of data set you can visualize. You should have two bytes of memory for each point in your data set in order to have maximum interactivity. However, you can visualize larger data sets with reduced interactivity.

How to get Vis5D

Vis5D is available by anonymous ftp from iris.ssec.wisc.edu/pub/vis5d. The distribution consists of two files:

vis5d-4.2.tar.Z - source code and documenation (5.4MB)
vis5d-data.tar.Z - sample data sets, map files, topography files (4.7MB)

If you've used Vis5D in the past you do not need the vis5d-data.tar.Z file since you should already have the files it contains.

The README file contains the complete Vis5D documentation including compilation and installation instructions (section 2).

Manual ftp operation:

% ftp iris.ssec.wisc.edu
Connected to iris.ssec.wisc.edu
Name:  anonymous
Guest login ok, type your name as password.
Password:  myname@address
ftp> cd pub/vis5d
ftp> asc
ftp> get README
ftp> bin
ftp> get vis5d-4.2.tar.Z
ftp> get vis5d-data.tar.Z
ftp> bye

Precompiled Vis5D executables (along with map and topography files) are available for the following systems:

Your Web browser will ask where to put the file and what to name it. Put it in the directory where you want to install Vis5D, and name it vis5d.tar (your browser should automatically uncompress the file). Then enter the command "tar -xvf vis5d.tar" (make sure you're in the dirctory where you want to install Vis5D). Now Vis5D is installed. You can get rid of the tar file by entering the command "rm vis5d.tar".

If you are in Europe

Recently, users in Europe have had problems with low bandwidth to North American ftp servers. The Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum has offered to serve as a mirror site for our software. Here are links to the files available:

Manual ftp operation:

% ftp ftp.dkrz.de
Connected to info.dkrz.de
Name:  anonymous
Guest login ok, type your name as password.
Password:  myname@address
ftp> cd pub/visu/ssec/vis5d-4.2
ftp> asc
ftp> get README
ftp> bin
ftp> get vis5d-4.2.tar.Z
ftp> get vis5d-data.tar.Z
ftp> bye

Serving and Viewing Vis5D Files Via the Web

In order to make it easy for modelers to examine each other's data sets, we have defined Vis5D files as a medium for exchanging information on the World Wide Web. Links to Vis5D files can be embedded in Web pages (just as links to GIF files can be embedded in web pages), and Mosaic can automatically invoke Vis5D to view them (just as it automatically invokes xv to view GIF files).

Click here to find out how to do it.

Getting Help

Vis5D is free software and as such we do not provide real support for it. However, we will be happy to answer questions and/or help with minor problems (preferably by email).

Email can be sent to Bill Hibbard at whibbard@macc.wisc.edu or Brian Paul at brianp@ssec.wisc.edu .

U.S. Mail can be sent to:

Space Science and Engineering Center
University of Wisconsin - Madison
1225 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI  53706

There is a Vis5D mailing list. To subscribe to it send Bill or Brian a message asking to be subscribed. To post to the list address your message to vis5d-list@ ssec.wisc.edu.