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Open 3D Scientific Visualization Toolkit
Mark Leaman writes "The Science Museum of Minnesota has just announced an online community site for scientific visualization, including thier Open 3D Visualization Toolkit that includes Blender and the GIMP as part of the core development tools. Frustrated with a lack of consolidated resources and discussion about open-source, scientific visualization development tools, the Science Museum of Minnesota's Learning Technologies Department decided to develop their own."
These museums, with very few exceptions are almost purely supported with government funds. They just can't make back the cost of upkeep, much less salaries, on the few dollars they make through admission fees.
There are a few that can make ends meet by appealing to private business, but for the most part these museums are supported with public money.
Now the point of all this government talk is that sometimes it takes the government to do something good and worthwhile for the general public. If it were up to the private sector, such an undertaking would 1) not have been undertaken in the first place and 2) if it were developed, it wouldn't have been released as OSS.
Hooray for these hackers! And thank god they've got an enlightened government supporting them.
Maybe you should give VTK, OpenDX, VisIT or Paraview a try, all of which are just some of the scientific visualisation community's tools of choice (and hey, they're OSS, mostly cross-platform as well).
You should take a look at VPython -- Simplest 3-D visualization that I know of (and it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux).
http://www.vpython.org/
Where is the repository for open scientific data for visualization? The NASA website of raw data decoded from the streams sent by our probes? The USGS GPS models? CAT/MRI scan files from dead people? X-ray crystallography data from public research institutions? Their CD distro is a good start, with models from their Turkish dig site. Without data, this tool is just a toy.
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make install -not war
This the point where I remind people of OpenDX, which is the open sourced IBM Visualization Data Explorer. DX used to be an extremely expensive commercial product, but it's been open source for a couple of years now.
It's very good. If you're into scientific visualization it's worth examining.
Proprietary? VRML is an ISO/IEC standard.
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Until you wake up and have to do graphics for a *living*.. Not just simple hobby stuff at home.
Don't get me wrong, GIMP can do nice things, but it does not replace photoshop for professional production work.
Will it someday ? Who knows.. just not today.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sorry, but I fail to see what Blender and the GIMP have to do with real scientific visualization. Blender is for 3D modelling, and the GIMP is for image processing.
If you're looking for complete, open source scientific visualization and data analysis packages, try VisIt, which supports dozens of input formats and runs on Linux, Windows, and MacOSX. Pick it up at http://www.llnl.gov/visit, or get the latest binaries from FTP here.
I have less knowledge of ParaView, but it is also free: http://www.paraview.org.
Both of these are also developed in part by the national labs; they can run parallel to handle terabytes of data, so if you've got small dataset they should be smokin' fast, and if you've got your own cluster you should be able to visualize some huge data.
If you're looking for just a toolkit to build your own application, try OpenDX or VTK.
Open-source Visualisation software:
Counter-examples:
Scroogle
I think OpenDX is a bit more than just a tool-kit. It also has a great GUI for doing visualization, without the need for too much coding (somewhat analagous to LabView, I suppose). I have found I really like MayaVI, which is a GUI for VTK. MayaVI/VTK are python scriptable, which is great.
Actually there is an open viewer for molecules. It's called Rasmol http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/ and many source files can be downloaded from their site.