Visualization software

A range of visualization software is required for the Computational Engineering activities undertaken by ACCES laboratories. To enhance the usability of the ACCES CoViz facility, a selection of advanced visualisation software is made available to its users, including the following:

A specialised rendering and remote visualization server is available to facilitate high-performance GPU ray-tracing and OpenGL rasterisation.

Please contact acces@epfl.ch if you require information and/or user support for any of the following visualization software. ACCES will try to put you in contact with the appropriate person or group.


     Abaqus/CAE

Abaqus/CEA is a software suite for finite element analysis and computer-aided engineering. It is popular with academic and research institutions due to the wide material modelling capability, and the program's ability to be customized. Abaqus/CAE provides a good collection of multiphysics capabilities, such as coupled acoustic-structural, piezoelectric, and structural-pore capabilities.

Abaqus/CEA also offers a comprehensive visualisation environment that enable users to analyse and communicate their simulation results; this is the main visualisation option since the export of results is limited.

Operating system: Windows and Linux

Licence: Commercial software (limited license available, contact acces@epfl.ch)


     Adobe Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro is a timeline-based video editing software application. It supports high resolution video editing at up to 10,240×8,192 resolution, at up to 32-bits per channel colour. Audio sample-level editing, VST audio plug-in support, and 5.1 surround sound mixing are available. Its plug-in architecture enables it to support a wide variety of video and audio file formats and codecs. When used with Cineform's Neo plug-ins, it supports 3D stereoscopic editing with the ability to view 3D material using 2D monitors, while making individual left and right eye adjustments.

Operating system: Windows and MacOS

Licence: Commercial software (limited license available, contact acces@epfl.ch)


     Amira

Amira is a multifaceted 3D software platform for visualizing, manipulating, and understanding biomedical data coming from all types of sources and modalities. Initially known as the 3D visualization tool of choice in microscopy and biomedical research, Amira has become more sophisticated, delivering powerful visualization and analysis capabilities in all visualization and simulation fields in life sciences.

Operating system: Windows, MacOS and Linux

Licence: Commercial software (limited license available, contact acces@epfl.ch)


     Avizo Fire

Avizo Fire offers a broad range of software tools for obtaining and visualizing advanced qualitative and quantitative information on material structure images of interest, e.g. in material sciences, micro-engineering and biology. In particular, it enables the 3D surface reconstruction from sliced image series, data filtering and interactive (stereoscopic) visualization.

Operating system: Windows, MacOS and Linux

Licence: Commercial software (limited license available, contact acces@epfl.ch)


     Blender

 

Blender is a 3D computer graphics software used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, printed models, interactive applications and video games. Advanced features of Blender include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animating, match moving, camera tracking, rendering, video editing and compositing.

Operating system: Windows, MacOS and Linux

Licence: Open source software (GNU GPL)

 


     Bino

 

Bino is a video player with the following main features:

Other advanced features include scriptability, automatic support for high precision color input and output, and support for using two camera devices simultaneously.

Operating system: Windows, MacOS and Linux

Licence: Open source software (GNU GPL)

 


     GoPro VR Player

 

GoPro VR Player is a 360-degree video & photo player for desktop computers. It enables users to watch 360° images & videos locally and enjoy professional playback features.

Operating system: Windows, MacOS and Linux

Licence: Commercial software (free download)

 


     Ovito

 

Ovito is a visualization software for both the analysis and the visualization of large-scale atomistic datasets produced by molecular dynamics/statics and Monte-Carlo simulation codes. The name Ovito is an acronym for Open Visualization Tool, emphasizing that this software has been designed with flexibility and extensibility in mind.

Operating system: Windows, MacOS and Linux

Licence: Open source software (GNU GPL)


     ParaView 

 

A general-purpose scientific visualization package based on the VTK library. Users can quickly build visualizations to analyze their data using qualitative and quantitative techniques. The data exploration can be done interactively in 3D or programmatically using ParaView's batch processing capabilities. ParaView was developed to analyze extremely large datasets using distributed memory computing resources. It can be run on supercomputers to analyze datasets of terascale as well as on laptops for smaller data.

Operating system: source code and executables for Windows, MacOS and Linux

Licence: Open source software (with commercial support from Kitware).


     POV-ray 

 

POV-ray, or the Persistence of Vision Raytracer, is a ray tracing program which generates images from a text-based scene description. POV-ray internally represents objects using their mathematical definitions; all POV-Ray primitive objects can thus be described by mathematical functions, as distinct from 3D mesh-based modelling packages (e.g. Blender). One of the main attractions of POV-Ray is its third party support that includes a large number of tools, textures, models, scenes and tutorials.

Operating system: source code and executables for Windows, MacOS and Linux

Licence: Open source software (GNU GPL).


     Stereoscopic Player

 

Stereoscopic Player is a versatile 3D movie player that allows you to play stereo­scopic videos and to watch live video from a capture device. Since it is based on Direct­Show, it can handle almost any media format, for example AVI, MPEG, WMV, ASF and MOV. Videos can be coded in several different stereo­scopic formats.

Operating system: Windows

Licence: Commercial software (limited license available, contact acces@epfl.ch).


     Trelis 

 

Trelis is a relatively simple-to-use (2D & 3D, structured & unstructured) mesh generation software for FEA and CFD analysis. It is also useful for converting CAD files into mesh format that can be viewed with conventional visualization software. A range of file formats can be imported and exported. Trelis shares the same development base as the Gambit software, and can be a suitable replacement tool.

Operating system: Windows, MacOS and Linux

Licence: Commercial software (limited license available, contact acces@epfl.ch).


     VisIt

 

A general-purpose scientific visualization package, VisIt contains a rich set of features and can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on 2D and 3D structured and unstructured meshes. VisIt was designed to handle very large data set sizes in the terascale range and yet can also handle small data sets in the kilobyte range.

Operating system: source code and executables for Windows, MacOS and Linux

Licence: Open source software (BSD license)


     VMD

 

VMD is a molecular visualization program for displaying, animating, and analyzing large biomolecular systems using 3D graphics and built-in scripting. It provides support for multi-core processors and GPU accelaration. In addition to Tcl and Python scripts, VMD implements "plugin" interfaces which provide a means for extending VMD at run-time.

Operating system: C++ source code and executables for Windows, MacOS and Linux

Licence: Open source software (UIUC license)