Surveyor Utility Programs

The utility programs described here are not really a part of surveyor, but are delivered together with surveyor to make it easier to use. Each program described here can be launched from your login shell, assuming your account has been set up as described in Setting Up Your Environment.

Each program here will describe its own command line arguments to you if you type in the command with no arguments, except where indicated.

backanimation

Background animation handler for Surveyor. Surveyor will start this program automatically when you render an animation in the background or a still frame to disk. You can run it manually to start or restart a background animation as well. It requires the background files created by Surveyor.

comp

Composite program. You can use this to composite multiple frames together. Optionally will make an image translucent, and will use the distance and percent images output from render to give high quality.

easeinout

Shell script utility. Used to generate values in a script for smooth start/stop acceleration.

fcompare

Shell script utility. Allows comparison of floating point numbers in a shell script "if" statement.

filter

Simple convolution filter program. Only allows a few built in kernels.

gaussdown

Scale in image down by two (quarter area) using a selectable low pass filter kernel.

hlocal

Convert a HALF format (16 bit signed) vicar image which is in VAX (low-endian) format to the local HALF (a "short" in C) format. Should work under any architecture, including Cray.

import

Flexible binary file importing utility. For example, can be used to skip a header and unpack a band interleaved by pixel image into one of its components. Outputs only a raw image.

lablst

List out the vicar label. Almost the same as Òhead -1Ó.

makepyr

Make an image pyramid. Important to use this prior to working with your large data sets in surveyor. See Surveyor user guide.

math

Shell script utility. Provides several mathematical operations such as MULT (multiply), DIV, etc. on floating point numbers in a shell script.

ramp

Nice utility to modify a Òlist of framesÓ type flight path (output from surv2rend) for render and do things like Òslow to a stop at this point, and start up smoothly at this point,Ó etc.

raw2vic

Convert a raw gray scale image to a vicar image.

render

Ray cast terrain renderer. Same renderer used in surveyor, but with many more options available. See seperate user guide.

shuffle

Take two images of the same size, and write an image of the same size where the odd lines are from the first image and the even lines are from the second image. The first line in an image is odd (1).

sizedown

Scale an image in half (quarter area) using a simple 2x2 box average.

surv2path

Convert a surveyor path file to a 3DI path file. Only useful if you have the VICAR program 3DI.

surv2rend

Convert a surveyor path file to a list of frames for the render program.

survd

Do not run. This is the Surveyor rendering daemon, and if Surveyor has been properly installed on your system this program will start up automatically for each view you have active in Surveyor.

takeout

Take out a portion of an image.

vic2yuv

Convert a vicar file to a yuv file for sending to an Abekas.

vicpaste

Simple mosaic program. Slap one image on top of another at the given location. Transparency optional.

weave

Take two images of the same size, and write an image which contains twice as many lines, where the odd lines come from the first input and the even lines from the second input. This program is useful for combining the two halves of field-rendered frames for an ntsc frame buffer.

xloadimage

Public domain image display program which has been modified for vicar images. Understands gray scale vicar images, and also color vicar images when given as a triplet seperated by commas. For example, xloadimage a.red,a.grn,a.blu.

xv

Public domain image display program, modified to read gray scale vicar images.
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