On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, Chris Pelkie wrote:
> >My colleagues and I are currently considering presenting our work with
> >OpenDX at VDE2000.
> >
> >Thanks for your offer!
> >
> >Tom
> >
> >
>
> Good! Tom B. has some frighteningly large data sets (bits of brain and
> stuff), as I remember. Plus, I assume you'd take your FreeBSD openDX, right?
>
> Chris Pelkie
You bet! Joel and I would come equipped with our Thinkpad 770's (mine
with FreeBSD, Joel's with Win95) running OpenDX. Yes, our datasets are
rather large 3D reconstructions of muscle and brain synapses. Our "small"
datasets contain 10's of millions of triangles. The marching cubes
isosurface extraction step takes a couple Gigs of RAM. We're not sure how
we're going to do process our "large" datasets. We'll need algorithms
that operate "out of core" (i.e. to and from disk cache). And you can just
forget about rendering these in DX. RenderMan is very efficient and can
render out of core (Level of Detail only gets you so far -- how do you
think they rendered every leaf and blade of grass in "Bug's Life"?).
Issues related to this would be an interesting topic for discussion at
VDE2000.
Tom
