PHIGS
Programmer's Hierarchical Interactive Graphics System
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Platform, Price, and Company
- RS/6000, pSeries 630 UNIX workstations and others
- Prices vary depending on the platform
- ISO graphics standard www.iso.ch
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Applications
- The PHIGS standard defines a set of functions and data structures to be used
by a programmer to manipulate and display 3-D graphical objects.
Like GKS-3D, OpenGL, and Direct3D, PHIGS is a standard for 3D graphics
API. It is the ISO standard for graphics with well constructed set of
functions. However, OpenGL and Direct3D are the de facto graphics standard
today, which come with more hardware and software support. PHIGS has been
used for complex 3D applications in technical and commercial areas, including
aided design and manufacturing, industrial design, engineering analysis,
and scientific visualization for a wide variety of graphics accelerators.
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Example/Samples
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Functions
- Basic Animation (Advanced Animation not recommended)
- Basic primitives including 2D and 3D text, markers, lines and polygons.
- Advanced primitives including triangle strips, quadrilateral meshes,
concave and multicolor polygons, NURBS curves, and trimmed and untrimmed
surfaces
- Line-on-line highlighting
- User-defined clipping volumes
- Antialiasing of primitives
- Lighting and shading
- Hidden-line/hidden-surface removal (HLHSR)
- Depth cueing
- Direct color
- Transparency
- Dithering
- Morphing
- Texture mapping (as a subset of PHIGS PLUS data mapping)
- Explicit traversal control (for immediate and mixed mode rendering)
- Archiving
- Support for Traditional Chinese, Hanual (Korean) and Kanji (Japanese)
as well as Unicode Standard languages
- 12-bit visual support
- Table of functions:
http://www.itl.nist.gov/iaui/vvrg/cugini/pvt/hy-funcs.html
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Web resources