When working on Ertan project, we have met many scientists and engineers. We found that they used main effort on the computation of the data, but to the interpretation of the data, they mostly use indirect and 2D ways. Methods of scientific visualization of 3D dam data are very limited. So we decided to do more. It provides many strong graphics and math computation function to let scientists or engineers realize their scientific idea easily.
Developer can concentrate on what they care most for and take little care for others.
IDL 5.0 provides object oriented programming method and its 3-D graphics functions are greatly strengthened by adopting OpenGL technology and it also provide ODBC database interface. So by using IDL 5.0 our idea can come true. We first realized a basic system that can deal with 3-D data of regular gridding data. The algorithmic we use are mostly derived from IEEE periodicals on scientific visualization, mathematics, graphics, image processing. We also do some improvement on these algorithmics according to the special condition of 3D data of Dam.