AVS and AVS/Express resources

Links

Interesting links for Advanced Visual Systems (AVS) products:

• Documents/info/projects that use AVS products.
• I try to help on the AVS developer forum.
• Some of my AVS/Express modules are available to everyone in the IAC Repository.

Help pages

More specifically, here are helpful pages for AVS/Express users:

• AVS/Express Performance Optimization Tips and Tricks. This document can be found also on James' AVS/Express Pearls pages.
• AVS/Express readers list.
• Sparse ideas from the development and performance enhancement of STM3.
• Some of the modules I have developed are not yet in the IAC repository. If you need them just ask:
  • CFX Native RES Data Format reader
  • Fluent Native Data Format reader
  • Matlab MAT files reader
  • Vis5D reader (well, this one is available on the IAC).
• I gave help for the VISIT Computational Steering toolkit porting. VISIT uses AVS/Express as its visualization server and was developed by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre.
• Are you not satisfied by the image_capture movies quality? Here are the instuctions to create high quality MPEG4 movies on Linux.
• The Visualization Handbook has been published. Chapter 33 covers AVS/Express and has been written by Jean Favre and myself.

Training and tutorials

And here are materials from training and tutorials I delivered:

• From the CINECA Summer School here is the “AVS/Express End-user Introductory Course” handout.
• From the AVS User Meeting 2006 held at ETH Zürich here are the materials from:
  • The General Visualization workshop handouts and commented slides.
  • The Chemical Visualization handouts.
• From the AVS Workshop 2008 held at ETH Zürich:
  • The commented slides of the “An introduction to the molecular visualization toolkit STM4” course.
  • The handout of the “Advanced visualization with AVS/Express” course.
• From the AVS Workshop 2010 held at ETH Zürich:
  • A user level AVS/Express course: mariovalle.name/AVS/introduction-to-xp.html
• From the AVS Workshop 2011 held at ETH Zürich:
  • The slides of the “Introduction to AVS/Express” course.
• For the AVS Workshop 2012 held at ETH Zürich:
  • The slides of the “Introduction to AVS/Express” course.

The AVS/Express Workshop

Currently the most important training event to which I contribute is the AVS Workshop held at the ETH Zürich. The current one has been held on May 23^rd, 2013. Here are the slides of the “Introduction to AVS/Express” course from this edition.

Instead here you can find material from the previous editions:

• The handout of the AVS Workshop 2008 course: “Advanced visualization with AVS/Express”.
• The slides of the AVS Workshop 2011 course: “Introduction to AVS/Express”.

Here are few AVS/Express resources that will be mentioned in the presentation:

• AVS homepage: www.avs.com
• Official documentation: help.avs.com/Express
• AVS forum: forum.avs.com
• AVS/Express built-in examples (try them. It is extremely important!)
• Getting started Dev Edition and Viz Edition
• Visualization concepts book (in the AVS/Express manuals collection)
• International AVS Center (IAC): www.iavsc.org
• IAC training material: www.iavsc.org/training
• Patches, doc and examples: ftp.avs.com/express
• A user level AVS/Express course: mariovalle.name/AVS/introduction-to-xp.html

Some AVS/Express projects

on which I worked in the past

	STM4 molecular visualization toolkit.
	Highlights: Library of components plus two new data types Benefits from module architecture Decoupling of AVS/Express interface from code through an interface library

	MOD3D – Tool for 3D reconstruction of undersea biological structures starting from a movie. This work has been done for ENEA CRAM (Marine Environment Research Center) that has published a paper on it.
	Highlights: Almost all was custom code GUI capabilities were critical (Data Viewer not used) Few visualization technique used Added modules for zooming, marking and navigation

	Distributed CFD data access for FERRARI Racing team aerodynamic simulations.
	Highlights: Standard visualization techniques plus some data cut/optimization modules added Fluent reader added to AVS/Express Big data sets Performance were critical The prototype benefited by quick prototyping capabilities offered by AVS/Express (unfortunately the project stopped at the prototype phase…)

	ELASIS immersive CFD visualization. ELASIS is part of the Fiat Group and supports the design of car interiors and apparatus.
	Here is one of the view of the prototype. It displays the immersive menu and one of the visualizations. It has been developed with AVS/Express Multi Pipe Edition. Highlights: Standard CFD techniques Input already in AVS UCD format Use immersive Multi Pipe Edition (with wand and head tracker) 3D widgets usable also from standard screen

	Created the Fluent Native Format reader for AVS/Express.
	This module, together with research on huge data access and visualization, formed the basis for the FERRARI Racing team prototype.

Experimental and simulated data management and visualization for a Pelton turbine study. This work has been done in collaboration with Profs. Avellan, Kueny and Farhat (Laboratory for Hydraulic Machines, EPF-Lausanne) and Etienne Parkinson (VA TECH Hydro SA, now Andritz Hydro). Three papers have been published on this work: one in 2004 and one in 2006 on fluidodynamics and one in 2005 on data management.

Highlights: Added CFX reader Added specialized visualization techniques Added modules to overcome AVS/Express annoyances (like extents on select cell set) Used a lot of validation modules (like computing integrals and surface areas) In depth study of colormaps that helps perception of fine details AVS/Express was mostly a prototyping environment

	Created the CFX RES Native Format reader for AVS/Express. It is used by the Pelton project.
	Highlights: A library from CFX simplified the implementation. A library from CFX introduced a lot of bugs outside our control.