General Surf3D Help
These web pages represent a quick-viewing interface to the numor data files
generated for each experiment at the ILL. The main interface page calls two
separate programs:
- convert_numors reads the given numors and writes information
like 2*Theta Start Angle, Omega, Chi, Phi, Temperature, and Intensities into a
seperate file that is then passed to surf3d.
- surf3d reads the converted file and generates a VRML file describing
the data surface. It also has several simple data processing functions, such
as: a smoothing function, a point-averaging/data-set-reduction function, and a
slicing function.
If no errors occur, the VRML file generated by surf3d is sent
back to the calling computer.
To make use of this interface, all you need is a
VRML viewer.
You will need at least a PC 486-DX or PowerPC Macintosh to make good use of your VRML viewer.
VRML Viewers:
- Netscape's own live3D
is freely available for PC-Windows and Macintosh, and will soon be available
for UNIX computers. It will be installed automatically with Netscape V3.0
(standard) which can be
downloaded
directly from Netscape or one of its many mirror sites.
- Hewlett-Packard has its own VRML viewer,
Model Viewer.
- An excellent, free viewer for all platforms (UNIX, PC and soon Macintosh)
is VRweb from the
University of Graz (Austria) using the Mesa openGL 'clone'. VRweb will display
in 3D even on X-terminals!
- VRML originated from Silicon Graphics' Inventor format, and the SGI VRML
viewer WebSpace can be downloaded from the
USA or
Europe.
Webspace interfaces to the SGI version of Netscape from the
USA or
Europe
. Since VRML is a subset of SGI Inventor, you can also use the latest version
of the SGI Inventor viewer (ivview) which is automatically downloaded with
WebSpace.
- The very latest VRML viewer for SGI and MS-Windows is SGI's
cosmoplayer
plug-in, which on a PC is as fast as Netscape's live3D, with the superior
rendering quality of VRweb. It is also the first viewer to support the
VRML-2 standard.
Complete information about VRML viewers can be obtained from the
VRML repository.
How to set up to make life easy on Unix computers
You must add the following to your Unix .mailcap and .mime.types files if you
want Netscape to automatically open your viewer when it encounters a VRML file.
(You can do the equivalent for Macintosh and Windows in the menu set-up):
To .mime.types add:
type=x-world/x-vrml exts=wrl,vrml
To .mailcap add something like:
x-world/x-vrml; webspace -remote %s -URL %u ; description="VRML document"
Or on SGI you may use the Inventor 2.1 Viewer by adding instead something
like:
x-world/x-vrml; ivview %s ; description="VRML document"