Many models and simulations in physics, chemistry, biology and other areas of science and engineering benefit considerably from a 3-D visual representation. It is particularly valuable to have a dynamical and interactive 3-D representation that can be used both to help debug and validate a model but also to interpret its findings when used as an experimental support tool. Software technologies such as OpenGL have become relatively standardized solutions for direct linking to simulation programs, although higher-level object-oriented systems such as Java3D are also useful in this regard. Hybrid tools such as JOGL are also available and can be used to good effect with interactive simulations. This article presents a discussion of some of the issues involved in constructing visual simulation tools and a review of some of the fundamental ideas that went into a tool such as the Projectium model renderer which was written in Java. The Projectium tool supports a number of different model file formats and tools for experimenting with model editing and making simple movie frames in the context of simulated models. Some ideas on educating students on advanced graphics and animation simulations are also given.
Keywords: 3D solids; simulation models; projections; visualization; algorithm; OpenGL; JOGL; Java.
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