Canvas3D : Installation Guide

Canvas3D has been designed to be portable over several different platforms. The current version of Canvas3D has the graphics engine layer implemented over Direct3D, one of the components of Microsoft's DirectX SDK. DirectX has been announced to have support for Windows95, Windows NT and Power Macintosh platforms. Canvas3D, as in December 1996, has been successfully implemented over Windows95. It is expected that no further changes in Canvas3D would be required for Windows NT and Power Macintosh platforms as far as the graphics engine is concerned.

The following steps would be required to get Canvas3D successfully running :

  1. To start with, you need a desktop computer with Windows95 Operating System. Make a directory, say Canvas3D somewhere.

  2. Install Tcl/Tk. The core Tcl and Tk libraries are distributed freely in C source code form. They run on all UNIX platorms, Macintosh (68k and Power Mac), and Windows (3.1, NT, and 95). The source can be downloaded from the Tcl/Tk Project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Install Tcl/Tk in the directory Canvas3D, such that you have Canvas3D\tcl7.6 and Canvas3D\tk4.2 sub-directories for Tcl7.6 and Tk4.2 code respectively.

  3. Download DirectX3 SDK from Interactive Media/Games by Microsoft. You will need to install only Direct3D for Canvas3D. A successful test to check if DirectX has been properly installed for Canvas3D is to try out the demo programs.

    Make a directory Canvas3D\Direct3D. Direct3D must be installed such that you have two sub-directories Canvas3D\Direct3D\inc and Canvas3D\Direct3D\lib holding its header files and libraries respectively.

  4. Download source code for Canvas3D from here (available in WinZip file format) into the Canvas3D directory and unzip it. The makefile is in Canvas3D\canvas3d\win.

    [ P.S. Please make the following changes in the canvas3d.mak file : Change the absolute paths \apatel\src\canvas3d\Direct3d\geMemBitmap.c and \apatel\src\canvas3d\Direct3d\d3derror.c to the relative pathnames ..\direct3d\geMemBitmap.c and ..\direct3d\d3derror.c respectively. I will make the changes in the downloadable zipped code as soon as possible... - Ankit ]

Ankit Patel (apatel@cs.cornell.edu)