WorldViz Vizard Development Edition

Key Reasons Why Developers Use Vizard

Performance The Vizard rendering core is a high-performance graphics engine developed in C/C++ using the latest OpenGL extensions. You get to develop in Python while Vizard automatically transforms your project into a Vizard byte code abstraction layer (LAXMI) that efficiently directs the rendering core. Graphics performance is maximized through view frustum culling and state sorting of properties such as textures and materials. As GPU's get faster and faster, LAXMI allows your application to take full advantage of advances in graphics pipeline architecture.

Simplicity Vizard is both an integrated development environment (IDE) and high-level graphics library seamlessly blended into the Python programming language. Our IDE simplifies the tasks of maintaining your digital assets, provides real-time viewing and adjustment of your scenes, and gives you sophisticated tools for debugging your scripts. Most important, however, is the library’s power at encapsulating many complex graphics or hardware interface issues (literally thousands of lines of OpenGL code) into a single line of Vizard Python script code.

Community Vizard has been used by developers of virtual reality applications and scientific visualization for over a decade. This track record means you can count on Vizard’s features to be both rich and robust, and able to meet the challenges of the real-time VR community. Given the size of the Vizard community, you’ll be able to find help when you need it and be assured you’re investing in a long-term platform.

Supported standards:

Vizard embeds the powerful Python 2.4 language as its core for programming logic. This means you get a modern, object-oriented language that has an enormous & growing user community backing it ensuring that your code investment is secure & portable. Existing libraries are available for hundreds of different specialty tasks.

OpenSceneGraph provides an internal scene graph structure to your project, allowing you to reap the performance & programming benefits of this logical structure. Since OpenSceneGraph is an open architecture, you can write your own performance modules to expand on the already rich feature set in Vizard.

OpenGL Shading Language: built-in support for GLSL, allows you to dynamically generate shaders & modify uniforms at run-time.

On-The-Fly geometry: Create & modify any OpenGL primitive (points, lines, triangles, etc) in your script. This allows real-time procedural geometry.

Embed HTML pages right in your graphics window for instant display of text & graphics.

Formats:

Extensive 3D model formats: WRL (VRML2/97), FLT (Open Flight), 3DS (3D Studio Max), TXP (multi-threaded TerraPage loader), GEO (Carbon Graphics), BSP (Quake3 world layers), MD2 (Quake animation models), AC (AC3D), OBJ (Alias Wavefront), LWO/LW (Light Wave), PFB (Performer), OSG's native OSG/IVE format, DirectX, & 3DC point cloud.

Video formats: Any DirectShow compatible video format can be used as a texture, including AVI, MPG, WMV, animated GIFs, & more. Access to frame-by-frame control of video is available. Videos with alpha channels are supported.

Raster image formats include: RGB/A, DDS, TGA, GIF, BMP, TIF, JPG, PIC, PNM/PGM/PBM, PNG, JPEG 2000. Support for compressed & mip-mapped images provided in DDS format.

Audio modes: mono, stereo, 3D; supported formats: WAV, MP3, AU, WMA, MIDI, & DirectShow.

Character (human biped) formats: 3D Max Character Studio (via 3rd party exporter) & Cal3D.

Additional features:

Built-in support for sophisticated character an