ParaView is an open source application for parallel scientific visualization from Kitware. ParaView is built on top of the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), exposing much of VTK's functionality through an easy to use graphical interface using Qt. Paraview is built on a client-server architecture that provides remote visualization capabilities, providing scalable support from desktop visualization to cluster based visualization. Data can be imported from a range of sources and viewed using volume rendering, isocontouring and isosurfacing. Documentation on ParaView is in the form of a Guide book that can be purchased from Kitware.

Blender is an open source 3D animation software that can be used for many 3D applications including modelling, texturing, skinning, animating and simulations. Blender’s advanced simulation tools such as rigid body, fluid and soft body dynamics and character animation tools are similar in scope and depth to other high end 3D software such as 3DS Max and Maya.

Blender capabilities include, among many others, support for a variety of geometric primitives including polygon meshes, Bezier curves, NURBS surfaces etc., internal rendering capabilities, keyframed animation tools, Python scripting for tool creation and prototyping, game logic etc. It is available for following operating systems: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. Detailed tutorials can be found in Blender Tutorials.

Prefuse is an open source extensible framework for creating interactive visualizations of information and relational datasets. The Java-based toolkit can be used to create standalone applications, embed visualization components in larger applications and create web browser applets. Prefuse provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity.

Piccolo is a toolkit that supports the development Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs). It can also be used in the development of other 2D structured graphics programmes. It is used to develop robust, full featured graphical applications in Java and C# with zooming, animation and multiple representations. Piccolo performs this by maintaining a hierarchical structure of objects and cameras to allow the building of structured graphical applications without going into low level details. The infrastructure within Piccolo provides efficient screen repainting, bound management, event handling and dispatch, animation etc.

Tags: vector graphics, svg

Inkscape is a powerful, open source, vector graphics editor application having similar features to commercial products such as Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw. It runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It is under active development with regular upgrades. The basic types of objects in Inkscape include paths, rectangles, ellipses, polygons, text, raster images, clones spirals and 3D boxes. All these objects can be moved, rotated, scaled and skewed as well as styling such as solid or gradient colour fills.