AVS Press Release: World's Leading Hydrodynamic Modeling Product Uses Toolmaster

World's Leading Hydrodynamic Modeling Product Uses Toolmaster Software by AVS to Present Complex Data

(Waltham, MA — May 1, 2002, 1:00 p.m. EDT) Sophisticated charting, graphing and presentation software from Advanced Visual Systems, Inc. is being used by WL | Delft Hydraulics to provide advanced visualization and print capabilities for Delft-GPP, the visualization component of the company's Delft3D hydrodynamic modeling package.

Delft3D is a modular software framework that represents 2D and 3D flow, water quality, ecology, short wave propagation and morphology, and is widely used to model coastal, river and estuarine areas. The Delft-GPP module of Delft3D relies on AVS' cross-platform Toolmaster™ software to provide general post-processing, allowing users to access and selectively visualize computational results and measured data produced by other Delft3D modules. Users can choose between predefined settings to expedite presentation of complex data, or modify these settings to meet individual requirements.

Specific user capabilities within Delft-GPP include importing Delft3D data and various external data formats; creating data sets; selecting plot composition, layout, and presentation techniques; viewing the presentation on-screen or as high-quality hard-copy; generating animated video of the visualization; and exporting to industry-standard GIS or text files.

"The post-processing has to be supported on a wide variety of platforms, and it involves the management of data sets with complex interpretations. WL | Delft Hydraulics chose Toolmaster based on portability, the ability to encapsulate it in a custom-made user-interface, the range of printers and plotters that are supported and, above all, the graphical functions that are both low-level, such as drawing a line, and high-level, such as contouring an arbitrary quadrangle," explained Arjen Markus, Consultant at WL | Delft Hydraulics. "We also needed to provide a flexible layout, allowing users to combine results with measurements, or enhance the appearance of the coastal outline — all with just a few clicks in the user interface."

Delft3D is extensively used both in research and consultancy projects by WL | Delft Hydraulics and by the company's customers, with about 100 user sites worldwide. The Delft3D software is available for Microsoft Windows and NT 4.0 as well as Hewlett-Packard, Sun and SGI UNIX-based systems.

Toolmaster provides Microsoft Windows and X Windows developers with a cross-platform library of more than 500 C/C++ and FORTRAN functions for scientific, technical and commercial graphics. Toolmaster is the most comprehensive toolset available for visual data analysis and presentation under MS Windows and X Windows-based applications. Toolmaster also serves as the basis of AVS' market-leading end-user technical charting package, Gsharp™.