1. Getting Started

1.1 Introduction

FlowVR Render relies on the FlowVR middleware. A good understanding of the FlowVR concepts is thus required.

Several sources of documentation are available:

The FlowVR web site that gives access to all available resources including this documentation.
Several publications available at http://flowvr.sourceforge.net/FlowVRPublications.php that give a good overview of FlowVR and FlowVR Render mechanisms.
This documentation organized into 4 chapters:
- Getting Started: all instructions to download, compile, install and test FlowVR Render on a machine.
- User Manual: Everything you should know to develop a FlowVR Render application.
- VTK: VTK rendering with FlowVR Render.
- Mplayer: a FlowVR Render movie player based on mplayer.
The source code and a documentation extracted with Doxygen.

Linux (Debian, RedHat/Fedora, Mandriva successfully tested) on 32 bits architectures and 32/64 bits architectures (Opteron). We strongly advice to use a 2.6 Linux kernel (or higher version) with the NPTL for a better performance.
FlowVR Render relies on the Cg shader library, thus better performance are generally obtained with Nvidia graphics cards (NVIDIA Geforce 4 at least).

To compile and run FlowVR Render, the following tools should be properly installed:

FlowVR
The GL and GLUT libraries with their headers (installed on Mandriva using urpmi libMesaglut3-devel in a root shell).
The Cg library (http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cg_toolkit.html)
The DevIL library compiled with OpenGL support (http://www.imagelib.org). Binaries or packages are available for most Linux, but not always compiled with OpenGL support.

FlowVR Render is part of the FlowVR Suite. So dowload FlowVR Suite, compile and install it: See the FlowVR Suite documentation.

To launch the test example:

bin/flowvr-render-demo.sh

This example opens an OpenGL windows where you should see bouncing spheres.

**Figure:** The sphere test.

2009-04-06