Tools Selection

Hi there,

I was hoping that someone can point me in the right direction and provide some advice in regards to what tools I should use in order to develop a visualization program for a scientific application.

I have only 3 months of OpenGL. Here are the requirements:

  • program with GUI interface (windows, menus, controls, buttons, lists, text boxes, texts)
  • volume display with many zoom levels (show planetary data at galaxy level, then solar system level, then planet level, then area of planet level…)
  • navigation through 3D space (move from planet to planet)
  • selection and moving of objects (change planet coordinates from one point to another)
  • very little animation required (some comet trajectories)
  • preferr to reuse code written in C on Linux and LGPL / free / public domain code

I don’t feel like starting from scratch; I like Blender because it kinda has a lot of that, but its GPL. I looked at Ogre3D which is interesting but it is C++.

Any articles, references, papers, books or other sources of information about tools/engines that can be resused
for that would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Regards,
David

Well if you are to visualize scientific data
you should take a look at the “visualization toolkit”.
http://www.vtk.org/
Basically it is designed for C++ but you can use it with java if you like.
Don’t know how good it works on visualizing a planetary system though.