15-463 course software

15-463 Course Software

Libraries

The subroutine libraries we will be using most are the same ones you probably used in 15-462:

OpenGL is a programming interface for interactive 3D graphics. We have the man pages on line. OpenGL implementations exist for various platforms. SGI has their own, of course. To learn more OpenGL we recommend the book OpenGL Programming Guide, 2nd Edition: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 1.1 by Mason Woo, Jackie Neider, and Tom Davis, Addison Wesley, 1997. (The first edition of this book is fine, too). You can read the OpenGL Programming Guide online using the Insight electronic documentation package on the SGI's. Type "insight &" into an SGI, wait a minute for the program to start, then find "OpenGL_PG" in the top subwindow and double-click on it.
Mesa is a free OpenGL clone which runs on almost anything, albeit more slowly. The Mesa README file is also useful, especially for tips on how to manage X-Windows color maps. Mesa can emulate a 24 bit display on an 8 bit one, and that's the way we recommend using Mesa on the Suns. Setting up the colormap so this works right is a bit tricky. If you want the full story, see the user guide, and do a find for "glXChooseVisual". The code we're providing for the assignments should set things up so that you don't need to worry about this, however. We are using Mesa on the Suns.
Xforms is a GUI programming package that we find much easier to use than TK. (As of 2001, the previous link to the university of Wisconsin at Milwaukee is dead, but try this mirror instead ). There's an online manual. Xforms comes with an interactive interface design and layout program called fdesign. If you already know and love TK, or something else, feel free...
SVL, the Simple Vector Library, written by Andrew Willmott here at CMU, is a C++ library for vector and matrix arithmetic. It is very useful for operations with xyz vectors, colors, and transformations.
libpicio. This is a little library provided for your convenience. It supports a very simple interface to and write TIFF or PPM picture files. Some of our programs, such as xplay, use this library. The routines you might be interested in are pic_read and pic_write. To use this library, you need to put #include <pic.h> in your source code and -lpicio on your link line. Currently, the only documentation for the library is the header file, pic.h, and the simple program tifflmap.c. The latter shows how to use the library to write a simple program to read, modify, and write a TIFF picture file. The source code for libpicio is in classdir/pub/src/libpicio. Libpicio is a layer on top of Sam Leffler's excellent libtiff library for TIFF picture file I/O.

We'll be supporting three platforms: the cluster Sparcs, SGI's, and Linux machines. You may use other platforms, but in that case you're more on your own. To avoid porting and installing a lot of software by yourself, we recommend that you use one of the supported platforms.

Other Software

tips on digitizing video
.mailcap file -- see this if your web browser (netscape, explorer) doesn't display postscript or pdf or quicktime or mpeg files properly.
xplay is a program written by me and past TA's for previewing animation. It can read a sequence of PPM or TIFF picture files, page them into the X windows server's memory, and display them in rapid succession. If the sequence is short, or your machine has sufficient memory available to its X windows server, sequences can be displayed in real time. (If you're not getting real-time playback rates, then try a shorter sequence of frames). Run xplay - to get a usage message.

Setup

Put the class bin directory in your path so that you'll have easy access to all the programs we'll need in this class.

    setenv cs463pub /afs/andrew.cmu.edu/scs/cs/15-463/pub
    set path = ($path $cs463pub/bin)

Linking

You must link in different libraries when using OpenGL on Suns and SGI's. Typical link sequences are:

on SGI: -lforms -lGLU -lGL -lX11 -lm 
on Sun: -lforms -lMesaGLU -lMesaGL -lX11 -lXext -lsocket -lm

and if you're linking with the pic_ and tiff_ routines, then you'll need -lpicio -ltiff as well.

You'll need to type the commands

setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/lib:/usr/local/lib:/afs/andrew/scs/cs/15-463/pub/lib
setenv LD_LIBRARYN32_PATH /usr/local/lib32

for shared object files such as libforms.so and libGL.so to be resolved correctly. It's probably a good idea to put these commands in your .login .

For hackers: You can get a list of shared object files that a given executable looks for, by running elfdump -Dl <PROGRAM> on an SGI or ldd <PROGRAM> on a Sun. If you're really curious about which versions of shared object files are getting linked in, you can set the following environment variables and this will affect the runtime linker, rld (on SGI's):

setenv _RLD_ARGS "-quickstart_info -v"
setenv _RLD_PATH /usr/lib/rld.debug

so that every time you run a program it will print gobs of info. To turn off the linker debugging info, do

unsetenv _RLD_ARGS
unsetenv _RLD_PATH

Documentation

To get documentation via the "man" program, run this:

setenv MANPATH /usr/share/catman:/usr/share/man:/usr/catman:/usr/man:/usr/local/man:/afs/andrew/scs/cs/15-463/pub/man

or better yet, put it in your .login or equivalent shell initialization file.

15-463, Computer Graphics 2
Paul Heckbert, Feb. 1999