Free displacement software for linux

Normal/Displacement Map Generator is a tool designed to help you create Geometry Normal Maps. Such maps are used in high-end Games to fool the Player into believing that a Low Resolution Mesh does have much more detail than it actually does.

Those kind of Normal Maps are best generated using a High Resolution Mesh from which the Normal Informations is extracted and projected onto the Low Resolution Mesh. This tool provides exactly this functionality. A known tool to do the same is ORB but it is windows only and impracticable to use for developing a game on a Linux system.

Besides generating a Geometry Normal Map this tool can also apply a Detail Normal Map onto of the generated Geometry Normal Map. Such Normal Maps are easily created using Normal-Plugins for 2D Graphic Applications like The GIMP. Those Normal Informations are then used to enhance the generated Normal Map. This process can be repeated many times.

Also generated is a Displacement or Height Map. Those maps can be used for Offset Mapping or with never Pixel Shader version to render a Low Resolution Mesh with much more detail by creating Vertices and Faces on the fly during rendering displacing them using such a Displacement Map. This map can also be used as a pure Height Map for Terrain Generators.

Pixie is a RenderMan like photorealistic renderer. It is being developed in the hope that it will be useful for graphics research and for people who can not afford a commercial renderer.
Pixie Renderer project is an open source project licensed under Gnu Public License (GPL).
Pixie is an open source project. None of the people contributing to Pixie is making any money out of it and were not asking for money. We need your feedback to keep this project alive. Use Pixie, submit bug reports, pictures you rendered with Pixie or just your good wishes.
One of the biggest considerations in Pixies development is the modularity. If youre interested in developing additional features / improving current features, improving the web site, optimizing Pixie, please let us know.
Main features:
- All RenderMan 3.2 primitives
- Quadrics: Sphere, Disk, Cone, Paraboloid, Hyperboloid, Cylinder, Toroid
- Parametrics: Bilinear/Bicubic patches, NURBS
- Subdivision Surfaces including crease/hole/interpolateboundary tags
- Points
- Curves
- Convex / Concave polygons with or without holes and their meshes
- Object instancing / delayed primitives
- Displacements
- Programmable shading (RenderMan Shading Language)
- High quality texture/shadow/environment mapping
- High dynamic range input/output
- Raytracing
- Motion blur
- Depth of field
- Reyes style rendering (very fast)
- Occlusion culling
- Network parallel rendering
- DSO shaders
- Global illumination
- Photon mapping
- Irradiance caching
- Automatically raytraced smooth reflections / shadows
Enhancements:
- 64Bit clean codebase. The Pixie source should compile cleanly on 64Bit platforms. Please let us know if you have any issues with this. Note: youll need libtiff (and X11 on linux / OSX) to be compiled in 64Bit mode too.
- Fixed issues with dissapearing subdiv geometry when raytracing
- Fixed issues with speckled irradiance / occlusion data when using the "R" mode
- Reduced raytrace memory overhead
- Support for vector/color/point/normal subscripting shorthand in SL v[n] = x => setcomp(v,n,x) x = v[n] => x = comp(v,n)

ParaView project is an application designed with the need to visualize large data sets in mind. The goals of the ParaView project include the following:
- Develop an open-source, multi-platform visualization application.
- Support distributed computation models to process large data sets.
- Create an open, flexible, and intuitive user interface.
- Develop an extensible architecture based on open standards.
ParaView runs on distributed and shared memory parallel as well as single processor systems and has been succesfully tested on Windows, Linux and various Unix workstations and clusters. Under the hood, ParaView uses the Visualization Toolkit as the data processing and rendering engine and has a user interface written using a unique blend of Tcl/Tk and C++. Please go here for a detailed list of features.
ParaView was created by Kitware in conjunction with Jim Ahrens of the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Contributors and developers of ParaView currently include: Kitware, LANL, Sandia National Laboratories, and Army Research Laboratory. ParaView is funded by the US Department of Energy ASCI Views program as part of a three-year contract awarded to Kitware, Inc. by a consortium of three National Labs - Los Alamos, Sandia, and Livermore. The goal of the project is to develop scalable parallel processing tools with an emphasis on distributed memory implementations. The project includes parallel algorithms, infrastructure, I/O, support, and display devices. One significant feature of the contract is that all software developed is to be delivered open source. Hence ParaView is available as an open-source system.
Main features:
- Handles structured (uniform rectilinear, non-uniform rectilinear, and curvilinear grids), unstructured, polygonal and image data.
- All processing operations (filters) produce datasets. This allows the user to either further process or save as a data file the result of every operation. For example, the user can extract a cut surface, reduce the number of points on this surface by masking, and apply glyphs (for example, vector arrows) to the result.
- Contours and isosurfaces can be extracted from all data types using scalars or vector components. The results can be colored by any other variable or processed further. When possible, structured data contours/isosurfaces are extracted with fast and efficient algorithms which make use of the special data layout.
- Vectors fields can be inspected by applying glyphs (arrows, cones, lines, spheres, and various 2D glyphs) to the points in a dataset. The glyphs can be scaled by scalars, vector component or vector magnitude and can be oriented using a vector field.
- A sub-region of a dataset can be extracted by cutting or clipping with an arbitrary plane (all data types), specifying a threshold criteria to exclude cells (all data types) and/or specifying a VOI (volume of interest - structured data types only)
- Streamlines can be generated using constant step or adaptive integrators. The results can be displayed as points, lines, tubes, ribbons, etc., and can be processed by a multitude of filters.
- The points in a dataset can be warped (displaced) with scalars (given a user defined displacement vector) or with vectors (unavailable for non-linear rectilinear grids).
- With the array calculator, new variables can be computed using existing point or cell field arrays. A multitude of scalar and vector operations are supported.
- Data can be probed at a point or along a line. The results are displayed either graphically or as text and can be exported for further analysis.
- ParaView provides many other data sources and filters by default (edge extraction, surface extraction, reflection, decimation, extrusion, smoothing...) and any VTK filter can be added by providing a simple XML description (VTK provides hundreds of sources and filters, see VTK documentation for a complete list).
Enhancements:
- This release adds parallel uniform rectilinear grid volume rendering (vtkImageData).
- It introduces new algorithms for parallel unstructured grid volume rendering.
- Support for hardware accelerated offscreen rendering using OpenGL framebuffers.
- Improved multi-block support.
- Improved AMR support.
- Animation saving with ffmpeg.
- Filters have been added for FLUENT, OpenFOAM, MFIX, LSDyna, and AcuSolve.
- A gradient filter for unstructured data.
- Many other enhancements and bugfixes.

Aqsis is a Renderman compliant 3D rendering toolkit. The project is based on the Reyes rendering approach.
Main features:
- programmable shading
- true displacements
- NURBS
- CSG
- Motion Blur
- direct rendering of subdivision surfaces

Fityk project is a general-purpose nonlinear curve fitting and data analysis software.
Although it is being developed to analyze powder diffraction patterns, it can be used to fit analytical functions to any kind of data: crystallographic module is an independent part of the program. Apart from crystallography fityk is reported to be used also in chromatography, photoluminescence, infrared and Raman spectroscopy, and in other fields.
At present fityk knows only about common peak-shaped functions (Gaussian, Lorentzian, Voigt, Pearson VII etc.) and polynomial. User-defined functions will be implemented in 2005.
In terms of powder diffraction fityk will fit the data with a set of position-correlated peaks to give the refined lattice parameters, zero-shift, sample displacement and wavelength.
Fityk offers everything a decent refinement program should offer but first of all intuitive graphical interface. Apart from the standard Marquardt least-square algorithm one may choose a genetic algorithm or Nelder-Mead simplex method for complex or unstable cases.
Fityk already works under Linux, Windows and MacOS X and can in principle be ported to other systems because its GUI is written with a portable wxWidgets library. And it is free software (GPL).
Main features:
- It is the heart of the program - finding minimum of weigthed sum of squared residuals, in other words - fitting function to data. Nonlinear fitting is a difficult problem, and there is no perfect solution. Fityk offers three well-known algorithms: Levenberg-Marquard gradient-based method, Nelder-Mead downhill simplex method and Genetic Algorithms. Every of these methods has a set of adjustable parameters, for greater flexibility.
- Data - a set of (x, y) points, can be read from text file, or from file in one of other supported formats. When loading data, you can read standard deviations of y s, if given, read only selected points (eg. first thousend, or every third point) or merge neighbouring points, to reduce noise. In every moment you can activate or disactivate selected points (disactivated points are not subject to fitting) or change standard deviation.
- Fitted curve is given as a sum of functions. All functions are given by parametrized formulae, eg. function of gaussian type has such parameters like height or position of center. Availaible functions are: gaussian, lorenzian, pearson VII, voigt, pseudo-voigt and fifth-order polynomial.
- Every parameter of function is given as a constans or as a variable or as a function of other parameters. First case is clear. In second case value of the variable can be adjusted when fitting. Optionally also domain of the variable can be given. In last case, the parameter can be given in terms of other parameters, eg. as a multiplication of constant and variable parameters.
- Background (baseline) may be obtained as linear or spline interpolation of points selected by the user or as a background function, that optionally can be fitted. Currently the only function suitable for background is a polynomial.
- There are two ways of dealing with error in x s. First requires specifying displacements of x in points, where it is known - program will interpolate it to the rest of points. Second assumes that the source of displacements is known and given by a zero-shift functions, which can be fitted.
- All commands, that are changing anything, what can influence further run of the program (eg. adding baseline, but not displaying help), can be logged to file. This is one of the ways to obtain a script, that can be edited and reused. Using scripts can save a lot of work, eg. it is possible to write scripts that will fit a series of data files and output results.
- The crystallographic module of the program enables easy adding peaks, that represents Bragg reflections. It is assumed that analyzed data points are intensities in function of 2theta, typically from X-ray diffraction. User have to define phases (lattice parameters), wavelengths with their relative intensities and which hkl s are present. Optionally, width and shape parameters can be constrained, using formulae taken from DBWS program.
- Fityk is written in C++. The program (GUI) can run on most Unix species with GTK+, on MS Windows and MacOS X. Ports to other platforms supported by wxWidgets library are also possible.
- The program comes in two versions: GUI (Graphical User Interface) version - more comfortable in most cases, and CLI (Command Line Interface) version (named cfityk to differentiate) - used only in special situations, when visualisation is not essential and user prefers to use a text terminal.
- There is a mailing list where everyone can ask a question. You can also write directly to programs author, although usually its better to use the mailing list. Asking for a change in fityk or for new feature will usually result in putting the request on TODO list or, if it is already on TODO list, in assigning higher priority to it.
- It is free software; you can redistribute and modify it under the terms of GNU General Public License. There is NO warranty.
Enhancements:
- The Shirley background correction procedure was implemented.
- A few bugs were fixed.

libposition provides a set of functions for calculating motion and displacement in one-, two-, and three-dimensional space.

It is part of The Universe Project.