More commercial applications have been created with Express than with any other visualization tool available.
This object-oriented development system for UNIX/Linux and Windows lets you create rich scientific and technical visualization apps and has found particular success in geospatial, medical, oil & gas, FEA and CFD applications.
AVS/Express Professional Edition (marketed in the United States as Developer Edition) and AVS/Express Multipipe Edition offer these powerful features:
- rapid application development using the popular Visual Network Editor and cross-platform GUIs
- cross-platform visualization and application deployment with no recompiling and no changes to app code
- illuminated lines visualization technique, which combines stream lines and particle animation with advanced texture display techniques to produce data visualizations with full 3D lighting, motion and 3D flow structure in a single view
- two-pass transparency for fantastic visual quality
- off-screen rendering for windowless batch operation under UNIX
- support on 64-bit platforms for arrays as large as 2 giga-elements
- more than 850 visualization objects for all Express versions, geared to match the most common application areas such as CFD, FEA, Medical, Geographic, images and geometric models
- huge repository of user-contributed source code available for download from the International AVS Centre
- autoload mechanism for easy installation and configuration of new modules
- scales to very large data and very complex systems — more than a half-million modules in one application
- modules for graphics display, common and advanced data visualization tasks, image processing, GIS import and manipulation, database interaction, and UI construction
- searchable HTML documentation
- advanced visualization support including vector field stream ribbons; jigsaw cell face extrusion; 2D/3D higher-order interpolated and search radius gridding; mesh optimization; textures on irregular geometries; arbitrary resampling onto new grids; generalized glyph systems; NULL data support in all data types; polar, cylindrical and spherical coordinate systems; multi-block data structure, module library and sample reader; 3D volume image processing macros; isoline/isosurface trace from seed points
- read/write of TIFF, GIF, JPEG, SGI RGB, Sun Raster, BMP and PBM image formats as well as netCDF format; import of CGNS and PLOT3D formats; output of AVI and compressed AVI, MPEG, and VRML formats
- multiple levels of database integration, from raw SQL to full graphical interfaces
- full key-frame animation control system.
AVS/Express Multipipe Edition extends these capabilities from the desktop to the realm of full 3D stereo immersion using systems such as the SGI™ Reality Center™ or CAVE®. Express Multipipe exploits the power of SGI's Onyx2® high-performance workstations, allowing each pipe to have multiple display channels and projectors, and each projector and channel to have a unique angle and orientation to create a single, large display.
Express MPE also includes support for head tracking and wand interactive devices, so your scientific and research projects can exploit the richer, more rapid understanding associated with "virtual reality" and perceptual computing interfaces
AVS/Express Visualization Edition includes a subset of Express's visualization modules — those for data visualization, image processing and user interface design — and like Express allows full C/C++ development. Express Visualization Edition is the perfect choice for end users working with complex data as well as researchers who need to customize existing visualization applications.
Express Visualization Edition has the same broad data import capabilities as Express Professional, plus allows exchange of visualization networks and results with other users and can be extended with more than 100 modules from the user repository at the International AVS Centre. The core activity of this outstanding resource is to foster industry-specific development and innovative uses of both AVS/Express and AVS5, thereby increasing these products' value to you.