Software

We support various software and toolkits spanning multiple areas of visualization, which includes 3D (Immersive VR), Information and Scientific Visualization. These are either currently installed on one of our systems or there is available in-house expertise.

Immersive Visualization:

  • Unity3D: Unity3D is a game development platform that can be used to build high-quality 3D games and virtual environments and deploy them across mobile, desktop, VR/AR, consoles and various OS.
  • Adobe Creative Cloud: Automated 3D Character creation, modeling and animation using:
  • Blender: Blender is a free and open source 3D application that supports modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, video editing and game creation. Click here for instructions on how to use Blender on the Palmetto Cluster.
  • VRUI VR Toolkit: A Virtual Reality (VR) development toolkit which enables easy configuration of a VR environment. It has enabled us to interface with Oculus Rift. With the use of a 6-DOF controller, we can easily navigate through the virtual environment.

Scientific Visualization:

  • Paraview: ParaView is an open-source, multi-platform data analysis and visualization application. Click here for instructions on how to use Paraview on the Palmetto cluster. Immersive Paraview is also supported.
  • VMD: VMD is a molecular visualization program for displaying, animating, and analyzing large biomolecular systems using 3-D graphics and built-in scripting. Click here for instructions on setting up and using VMD.
  • VisIt: VisIt is an Open Source, interactive, scalable, visualization, animation and analysis tool. Click here for instructions on how to use VisIt on the Palmetto cluster.
  • CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) model created by NVIDIA. Click here for instructions on how to use CUDA on Palmetto (one-page summary). Click here for an example of how to use CUDA/OpenGL visualization programming.

Information Visualization and Visual Analytics:

  • Gephi: Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. Click here for instructions on how to use Gephi.
  • Tableau: Tableau is software that can allow anyone to connect to a spreadsheet or file and create interactive data visualizations. Click here for instructions on how to set up and install Tableau Desktop.
  • Graphviz: Graphviz is open source graph visualization software. Click here for instructions on how to install and use Graphviz.
  • D3.js: A JavaScript library for visualizing data with HTML, SVG, and CSS. Click here for example codes for using D3.js.
  • LidarViewer: LiDAR Viewer is an application for visualizing and measuring 3D point cloud data, such as that collected via terrestrial or airborne LiDAR surveys. Lidar is a remote sensing method to map data points from an aerial scan of an area.
  • ArcGIS Pro: Application for creating and working with spatial data on your desktop. It provides tools to visualize, analyze, compile, and share your data, in both 2D and 3D environments. It allows researchers to take this data and form 3D models of scanned regions that they can explore virtually and analyze the topography and surface features of an area.

Other Resources