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What's New in IDL 6.4: New Features in IDL 6.4 |
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The following enhancements have been made to IDL's visualization functionality for the 6.4 release:
IDL's Z-Buffer device has been enhanced to support a 24-bit (TrueColor) frame buffer. By default, the Z-Buffer uses an 8-bit frame buffer; the new SET_PIXEL_DEPTH keyword to the DEVICE procedure allows you to specify the pixel depth of the buffer. The new GET_PIXEL_DEPTH keyword allows you to retrieve the current value from the Z-Buffer device.
See The Z-Buffer Device for complete details.
The shader functionality implemented in IDL object graphics provides access to the advantages of the hardware-based OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) features that are available on modern graphics cards. Using a shader program, computationally intensive image processing operations can be off-loaded to a graphics card that supports the OpenGL 2.0 interface. Additionally, the OpenGL Shading Language greatly expands on the capabilities of the fixed OpenGL rendering pipeline to produce advanced visual effects. A shader program can perform image filtering operations, complex lighting and shading calculations, interactive blending of multiple textures, animation of object vertices, or any combination of these.
The IDLgrShader object provides a way to associate a shader program with atomic graphic objects including IDLgrImage, IDLgrPolygon, and IDLgrSurface. In addition to the shader object, the IDL distribution also includes a small library of pre-built shader objects. The IDLgrShaderBytscl and IDLgrShaderConvol3 objects let you quickly add byte-scaling or convolution filtering shader functionality to an IDL application without having to write any shader code. Also, the new IDLgrFilterChain object lets you apply a series of image filtering shaders to an image. See New IDL Object Classes for more information. Also refer to Advanced Rendering Using Shader Objects for information about and examples of using shaders in IDL applications.
IDL Online Help (March 06, 2007)