Manifold® 3D View Studio™

Manifold®  3D View Studio™ is the easiest, most flexible application ever created to display and analyze data in three dimensions.  Create the most spectacular 3D plots and graphs you've ever seen!  3D View Studio is a complete 3D rendering application providing full control over materials, lighting, transparency, cameras, "fly through" animation, textures, color shading and many, many more factors.  All parameters are menu driven with presets creating sensible scenes to make the system easy to learn and easy to use.  See the Gallery for more images, mostly on thumbnails for fast selection and loading.

Manifold® 3D View Studio™ lets you see your data in spectacular three-dimensional images. Use 3D View Studio to display your data in a nearly infinite variety of styles, textures, colors and lighting effects. 3D View Studio works either as a standalone program or as a data visualization and analysis environment called from other programs. Manifold programs such as Manifold System Release 4.50 GIS and Manifold Database Commander will launch 3D View Studio to provide 3D services.   Manifold 3D View Studio may be purchased for only $75 at the Manifold Online Store.   3D View Studio is delivered by download within 24 hours of your order!    Note: 3D View Studio does not plug into Manifold System 5.00 or subsequent releases, which includes terrain visualization in 3D as a built-in feature.  To use 3D View Studio with Manifold System 5.00, one must export a 5.00 surface as a table, which can then be read into 3D View Studio.  See the knowledge base article on 3D View Studio and 5.00 for more information.

3D View Studio delivers three main functions:

Visualize Data - 3D View Studio allows you to visualize data in three dimensions. Data is displayed in a 3D view window as a set of points plotted in X, Y and Z coordinates, as a solid 3D surface interpolated from the 3D data, as a wireframe surface, or as a surface of regularly gridded points. A variety of styles may be used to create 3D "charts" or other effects. Any three numeric fields may be used as the X, Y and Z fields. Simple dialogs allow "fly through" dynamic movies that show data from different angles.

Create Presentation Graphics - Spectacular artistic effects will make your data presentations more memorable than a boring bar chart. 3D View Studio unleashes the power of sophisticated 3D rendering by linking all parameters to point-and-click choices in pull-down menu boxes. This allows use of professional-quality effects such as lighting, materials, textures and transparency.

Analyze Data - 3D View Studio can analyze your data for you in a variety of ways to help you find relationships using the 3D structure of the data that might be missed in a simple database table or 2D graphic presentation. Sophisticated analytic functions include waterline analysis, intersections, zones of sight, and other functions normally found only in packages that cost thousands of dollars.

3D View Studio is such a rich environment that it may be used to create 3D scenes as a general scene editor as well! 

Launch With Any Database

3D View Studio requires no additional software to display virtually any database in spectacular 3D images.  It installs with a complete Database launcher that can open database or spreadsheet files from Access, Paradox, dBase, Text formats, FoxPro, Excel or Lotus as well as ODBC database sources such as SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase and many others.

3D View Studio can automatically open any table in any database and allow use of any three numeric fields as X, Y and Z values for plotting. 

Dynamic Consoles

3D View Studio opens a main 3D View  console window and clicks open other controlling windows as necessary.  Clicking and dragging in the main window will rotate and move the view into the 3D data set.

 Point and Click with Menus and Presets

All 3D View Studio capabilities are menu driven from a combination of pull-down menus and context sensitive options and properties. Presets make it easy to set complex parameters such as Lighting and Material. Numerous automatic scene presets will create a spectacular view that may then be adjusted by changing properties as desried. .

3D Controls - By simply clicking a button in the 3D control panel, you can instantly switch the displayed form of the surface from an interpolated solid surface, a wireframe surface, as the original data points, or as a dotted point surface.  A huge number of styles are available for imaging:  see the Gallery of Charting Styles for a sample list of images.

Solid surfaces are interpolated using Akima method interpolation to preserve the "shape" properties implied by the 3D data distribution.  Point-and-click settings allow choices of solid colors or gradients for the surface, floor, base, z-plane, X, Y, and Z axes, or enclosing wirefame cube.  Scale X, Y, and Z axes independently.  Rotate on any three axis and zoom in and out in real time.

You can use the 3D Controls to do "waterline" analysis by clicking up and down buttons to see where the Z-plane cuts your data.   This makes for some great  "waterline" effects, to show how a Z "waterline" plane to cut data at various levels.  Excellent for visualizing flood plain action.  See Connecticut flooded from above in a 320KB animation or at an oblique angle in a 350KB animation.   Note: image quality has been degraded in the animations to save download time.  In "real life", 3D View Studio uses uses millions of colors to achieve smooth gradients! 

3D Analysis - If your data represents terrain elevations, or if you simply wish to apply geometric analysis to abstract data, you get numerous 3D analytic functions not found in some 3D programs that cost thousands of dollars. 

Visibility Analysis - Display all regions visible from one or more locations.  Find combinations of regions visible.

Detail (right and left): The Sight Zones function shows all areas of the surface that are visible from any of the four marked points.

Profiles - Display the vertical profile of the straight line "slice" through the 3D interpolated surface from a given start to a specified end point.

Tunnel / Bridge Depth - Adds a straight line through the profile to show where "tunnels" or "bridges" occur, and their depth or height from the straight line to the surface profile. Clicking anywhere between the vertical profile and the straight line gives the calculated value of the bridge height or tunnel depth at that spot.

  Note: We use black backgrounds for the demo screen shots because they look cool in web browsers.  You can set whatever colors you like.

Line of Sight - A Profile display that is colored to show what parts of the Profile are visible from the Start point. Visible parts of the profile are in light color. Invisible parts are in dark color.

Zones of Sight - An overhead view of the data set similar to Start/End Points. Grid boxes colored in blue are visible from the Start point. This actually shows the areas on your surface that are visible from the points you choose!   Wow! 

Detail (left): "Waterline" analysis using a semi-transparent floating plane. Heights where different parts of the 3D Surface are joined are instantly revelaed. 

3D Voyaging - Animator allows you to automatically animate "flights" through your data, or to fly through the data in 3D under interactive control.  Rotate, Zoom fly around your data on all three axes at once, if desired.  You can voyage at the same time you use 3D Controls to change colors or style of surface from solid, say, to wireframe. 

See a 398KB GIF animation of a 3D Voyager fly through (note: this sample movie loop provides only one frame in five to save download time).

Integration with GIS - 3D View Studio is perfectly integrated with Manifold System GIS 4.50.  A GIS is a "Geographic Information System," or high-end analytic mapping system.  Launching 3D View Studio with data sets taken from maps (using, say, elevation data to view terrain) makes it possible to automatically create visibility zones and other analytics in 3D View Studio and the see them back in the originating map.  For example,  the visibility zones created for two tower locations shown in the thumbnail at left can be brought back into Manifold GIS map as the polygonal area objects shown in the map thumbnail at right. (green and yellow dot show 100' tower locations and tan regions show visibility zones.  Red boxes and green crosses were used for planning purposes on the map and show the locations of DEM elevation points).    Note: 3D View Studio does not plug into Manifold System 5.00, which includes terrain visualization in 3D as a built-in feature.  To use 3D View Studio with Manifold System 5.00, one must export a 5.00 surface as a table, which can then be read into 3D View Studio.  See the knowledge base article on 3D View Studio and 5.00 for more information.

See the Case Study on Visibility Zones for an example of integration with Manifold System GIS.

See the Case Study on DEMs for preparing DEMS for use with Manifold System.

See the free, downloadable Triangulation and Data Thinning solver package for information on accessory solvers often used with 3D View Studio.

For more information, see the complete Online User Manual.  For the User Manual in Microsoft Word .doc format, click here.

Buy Online for Immediate Delivery

To buy 3D View Studio and download it right now, jump on over to the Manifold.net Online Store.

Questions? Send Email or Telephone

Email sales@manifold.net at any time, or call 800-556-5919 during business hours if you have any questions regarding products, purchasing, or shipping information. Check out the Miscellaneous Info page for more details regarding purchasing and shipping, and visit the Online Store's information pages. Visit the Manifold.net Online Store right now to order your Manifold Data Set products.

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