caguero / covise

Collaborative Visualization and Simulation Environment & OpenCOVER

COVISE and OpenCOVER

COVISE, the collaborative visualization and simulation environment, is a modular distributed visualization system. As its focus is on visualization of scientific data in virtual environments, it comprises the VR renderer OpenCOVER. COVISE development is headed by HLRS. It is portable to Windows and UNIX. We do regular builds on x86_64 Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

License

If not stated otherwise, COVISE and OpenCOVER source code is licensed under the LGPL v2.1. See lgpl-2.1.txt for details.

Support & Mailing Lists

As a user of COVISE, you might get answers to your questions on the covise-users mailing list. Please direct any questions related to installing/building/using COVISE there.

You can receive notifications of changes to COVISE on the covise-commits list.

Getting COVISE

UNIX

Getting COVISE is as easy as

  git clone https://github.com/hlrs-vis/covise.git --recursive

Update your existing copy to the current version by

  git pull -r
  git submodule sync
  git submodule update --init --recursive # update submodules to latest required version

Build Requirements

• C++ compiler: C++03 or C++11

  On Windows, only Visual Studio 2012 is tested.

• CMake: 2.8.10 or newer should work

• XercesC:

• Qt: Either Qt 4 or 5 is required by the graphical user interface. If you want to use the Qt/Coin3D/SoQt based desktop renderer (QtRender), then this version of Qt has to match the one that SoQt is built against.

  For Qt5, you need the following modules:

  • Qt5Core
  • Qt5Network
  • Qt5Xml
  • Qt5Widgets
  • Qt5OpenGL
  • Qt5WebKit
  • Qt5WebKitWidgets
  • Qt5Gui
  • Qt5Svg
  • Qt5PrintSupport
  • Qt5UiTools
  • Qt5Script
  • Qt5ScriptTools

  On Ubuntu 14.04, you should be able to install the required packages with this command: sudo apt-get install qttools5-dev qtscript5-dev libqt5scripttools5 libqt5svg5-dev libqt5opengl5-dev libqt5webkit5-dev

• Boost: 1.52 and newer should work, following boost libraries are required:

  • chrono
  • date-time
  • filesystem
  • iostreams
  • locale
  • program-options
  • regex
  • serialization
  • system
  • thread When any of these are missing, you will only get a generic message, that "Boost" is missing. Thus beware! Ubuntu 14.04: sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

• Python: Python 3 is required for the GUI vr-prepare and for the scripting interface

• GLEW: Used for OpenGL extension handling in Virvo (direct volume rendering) and OpenCOVER

• OpenSceneGraph: 3.2 or newer is required for the VR renderer OpenCOVER

• Open Inventor The desktop renderer on Linux requires Open Inventor. The binaries shipped with most Linux distributions do not correctly render fonts on 64 bit systems. Install a fixed version: git clone https://github.com/aumuell/open-inventor.git cd open-inventor make IVPREFIX=$EXTERNLIBS/inventor install

Optional dependencies

• JPEG Turbo
• VTK Version 6 is required.
• Flex and Bison Lexer/Parser generators, required to build VRML plugin.

CMake will show lists of met and unmet optional and required dependencies. You should check those and install additional prerequisites as needed.

Working with Git

UNIX

  cd covise
  git pull -r #-r requests a rebase of your changes to avoid trivial branching
  git submodule update --init --recursive # update submodules to latest required version

Building COVISE

UNIX

  cd covise
  source .covise.sh #set environment variables
  make #invoke cmake followed by make

COVISE and OpenCOVER are built by two separate CMake projects. This command sequence sets environment variables necessary while building COVISE, invokes cmake for the COVISE project, builds COVISE, and then continues with invoking cmake for the OpenCOVER project followed by make.

After an initial build, it is possible to invoke make from within subdirectories of covise/src.

No installation is required: you can use COVISE directly from the build tree.

Windows

   REM set COVISEDIR to location of your COVISE checkout
   set COVISEDIR=c:/src/covise
   REM set EXTERNLIBS to correct location of all your dependancies
   set EXTERNLIBS=c:\src\externlibs\tamarau
   cd %COVISEDIR%
   REM call winenv.bat with appropriate archsuffix for debug or release
   call %COVISEDIR%\winenv.bat tamarauopt
   mkdir build.covise
   cd build.covise
   cmake-gui ..
   devenv
   cd %COVISEDIR%
   mkdir build.cover
   cd build.cover
   cmake-gui ../src/OpenCOVER
   devenv

Changing CMake Settings

You can influence which parts of COVISE are built by editing CMake settings in ${COVISEDIR}/${ARCHSUFFIX}/build.covise/CMakeCache.txt. This might help you work around build problems.

cd ${COVISEDIR}/${ARCHSUFFIX}/build.covise
ccmake ../..

• COVISE_USE_VIRVO: disable support for direct volume rendering
• COVISE_BUILD_DRIVINGSIM: enable the road editor oddlot as part of the OpenCOVER CMake project
• COVISE_USE_CUDA: disable use of CUDA
• COVISE_USE_QT4: enable Qt 4
• COVISE_CPU_ARCH: set optimization for the CPU in your computer
• COVISE_USE_CPP11: disable compilation in C++11 mode
• COVISE_BUILD_RENDERER: disable building the desktop renderer
• COVISE_GENERATE_DOCS: generate HTML and PDF documentation

After changing any of these settings, you have to restart the build process.

Invoking COVISE

UNIX

Add .../covise/bin to your PATH.

  covise

Source Code Organization

• cmake: cmake files

• doc: documentation and tools for creating documentation

• config: configuration examples

• scripts: support scripts for building COVISE

• share: architecture independent files: textures, shaders, example data, ...

• src: source code

  • src/3rdparty: 3rd party source code

  • src/tools: various programs related to building or using COVISE

  • src/kernel: COVISE core libraries

  • src/sys: COVISE core executables

  • src/module: COVISE visualization modules (algorithms)

  • src/OpenCOVER: VR renderer with its plug-ins