COVISE and OpenCOVER

COVISE, the collaborative visualization and simulation environment, is a modular distributed visualization system. As its focus is on visualization of scientific data in virtual environments, it comprises the VR renderer OpenCOVER. COVISE development is headed by HLRS. It is portable to Windows and UNIX. We do regular builds on x86_64 Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

License

If not stated otherwise, COVISE and OpenCOVER source code is licensed under the LGPL v2.1. See lgpl-2.1.txt for details.

Support & Mailing Lists

As a user of COVISE, you might get answers to your questions on the covise-users mailing list. Please direct any questions related to installing/building/using COVISE there.

You can receive notifications of changes to COVISE on the covise-commits list.

Getting COVISE

UNIX

Getting COVISE is as easy as

  git clone https://github.com/hlrs-vis/covise.git --recursive

Update your existing copy to the current version by

  git pull -r
  git submodule sync
  git submodule update --init --recursive # update submodules to latest required version

macOS

There is a Homebrew formula for COVISE. If you have it on your system, then you can simply

  brew install hlrs-vis/tap/covise

This will install COVISE with all its dependencies.

Build Requirements

• C++ compiler: C++11

  On Windows, we currently use Visual Studio 2017 (VC14). GCC 4.8 and newer should work.

• CMake: 3.1 or newer is required, but currently we suggest CMake 3.7

• XercesC:

• Qt: Qt 5 is required by the graphical user interface. If you want to use the Qt/Coin3D/SoQt based desktop renderer (QtRender), then this version of Qt has to match the one that SoQt is built against.

  For Qt5, you need the following modules:

  • Qt5Core
  • Qt5Network
  • Qt5Xml
  • Qt5Widgets
  • Qt5OpenGL
  • Qt5WebKit
  • Qt5WebKitWidgets
  • Qt5Gui
  • Qt5Svg
  • Qt5PrintSupport
  • Qt5UiTools
  • Qt5Script
  • Qt5ScriptTools

  On Ubuntu 14.04, you should be able to install the required packages with this command: sudo apt-get install qttools5-dev qtscript5-dev libqt5scripttools5 libqt5svg5-dev libqt5opengl5-dev libqt5webkit5-dev

• Boost: 1.52 and newer should work, following boost libraries are required:

  • chrono
  • date-time
  • filesystem
  • iostreams
  • locale
  • program-options
  • regex
  • serialization
  • system
  • thread When any of these are missing, you will only get a generic message, that "Boost" is missing. Thus beware! Ubuntu 14.04: sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

• Python: Python 3 is required for the GUI vr-prepare and for the scripting interface

• GLEW: Used for OpenGL extension handling in Virvo (direct volume rendering) and OpenCOVER

• OpenSceneGraph: 3.2 or newer is required, 3.4 or newer highly recommended for the VR renderer OpenCOVER

• Open Inventor The desktop renderer on Linux requires Open Inventor. The binaries shipped with most Linux distributions do not correctly render fonts on 64 bit systems. Install a fixed version: git clone https://github.com/aumuell/open-inventor.git cd open-inventor make IVPREFIX=$EXTERNLIBS/inventor install

Optional dependencies

• JPEG Turbo
• VTK Version 6 is required.
• Flex and Bison Lexer/Parser generators, required to build VRML plugin.

CMake will show lists of met and unmet optional and required dependencies. You should check those and install additional prerequisites as needed.

Directory for Third Party Dependencies

COVISE is set up to automatically search for third party libraries in subdirectories of a directory pointed to by the environment variable EXTERNLIBS. You should install e.g. OpenSceneGraph into $EXTERNLIBS/openscenegraph, and it will be discovered during the build process.

Working with Git

UNIX

  cd covise
  git pull -r #-r requests a rebase of your changes to avoid trivial branching
  git submodule update --init --recursive # update submodules to latest required version

Building COVISE and OpenCOVER

UNIX

  cd covise
  source .covise.sh #set environment variables
  make #invoke cmake followed by make

This command sequence sets environment variables necessary while building COVISE, invokes cmake for the COVISE project, and builds COVISE.

After an initial build, it is possible to invoke make from within subdirectories of covise/src.

No installation is required: you can use COVISE directly from the build tree.

Windows

Also on Windows, you should work from a command prompt:

   REM set COVISEDIR to location of your COVISE checkout
   set COVISEDIR=c:/src/covise
   REM set EXTERNLIBS to correct location of all your dependancies
   set EXTERNLIBSROOT=c:\src\externlibs
   cd %COVISEDIR%
   REM call winenv.bat with appropriate archsuffix for debug or release (tamarau for Visual Studio 2012 and zebu for 2015)
   call %COVISEDIR%\winenv.bat zebuopt
   mkdir build.covise
   cd build.covise
   cmake-gui ..
   REM open Visual Studio - either directly or with the button from CMake GUI
   devenv

Building Documentation

COVISE retrieves documentation from the web server at HLRS. But you also can build the documentation locally. You need the following tools:

• pdflatex
• latex2html
• doxygen
• graphviz

Then you can:

cd ${COVISEDIR}/doc
make

Changing CMake Settings

You can influence which parts of COVISE are built by editing CMake settings in ${COVISEDIR}/${ARCHSUFFIX}/build.covise/CMakeCache.txt. This might help you work around build problems.

cd ${COVISEDIR}/${ARCHSUFFIX}/build.covise
ccmake ../..

• COVISE_USE_VIRVO: disable support for direct volume rendering
• COVISE_BUILD_DRIVINGSIM: enable the road editor oddlot
• COVISE_USE_CUDA: disable use of CUDA
• COVISE_USE_QT4: enable Qt 4
• COVISE_CPU_ARCH: set optimization for the CPU in your computer
• COVISE_BUILD_RENDERER: disable building the desktop renderer

After changing any of these settings, you have to restart the build process.

Invoking COVISE

UNIX

Add .../covise/bin to your PATH.

  covise

Windows

COVISE can be used without installation, provided you take the same steps as for building:

   REM set COVISEDIR to location of your COVISE checkout
   set COVISEDIR=c:/src/covise
   REM set EXTERNLIBS to correct location of all your dependancies
   set EXTERNLIBSROOT=c:\src\externlibs
   cd %COVISEDIR%
   REM call winenv.bat with appropriate archsuffix for debug or release (tamarau for Visual Studio 2012 and zebu for 2015)
   call %COVISEDIR%\winenv.bat zebuopt
   covise
   opencover

Source Code Organization

• cmake: cmake files

• doc: documentation and tools for creating documentation

• config: configuration examples

• scripts: support scripts for building COVISE

• share: architecture independent files: textures, shaders, example data, ...

• src: source code

  • src/3rdparty: 3rd party source code

  • src/tools: various programs related to building or using COVISE

  • src/kernel: COVISE core libraries

  • src/sys: COVISE core executables

  • src/module: COVISE visualization modules (algorithms)

  • src/OpenCOVER: VR renderer with its plug-ins