Merging two technologies---a visualization tool for bridge engineering.

摘要

Bridge engineering has developed into a rigorous process to meet specifications set forth by national governing agencies. This development has led to various entities developing software to aid in the design process. These programs are capable of doing thousands of calculations, but at best allow limited visualization of the defined structure. The goal of this project is to develop BTViewer: an application that displays and provides the ability to interact with a three-dimensional drawing of a bridge obtained from the data stored in a Virtis(TM) database.;BTViewer consists of two main components: OpenSceneGraph (OSG) -- an open source library which simplifies the process of rendering objects in 3D--- and Virtis/Opis -- bridge rating and design programs which use a database to store data input by users. By using multiple inheritance to derive data classes from both OSG and the Virtis API, the resulting data classes may behave as either of the base classes. This design creates the ability to retrieve data from the Virtis database, set it in the derived data class and create a corresponding OSG object representative of the Virtis data. The Virtis API uses COM objects, so while all other components of the program are cross platform, the data in the Virtis database would have to be accessed using SQL queries if run on a non-Microsoft OS.;BTViewer is an application which gives Virtis users the capability to see a bridge definition in 3D before plans are drawn or the structure is built. Current features include displaying a structure consisting of steel girders, a deck and parapets, giving the user control over the opacity of the deck, and displaying different views of the structure in multiple tabs.;BTViewer is currently in a prototype phase. Its present implementation shows that it is a feasible project with potential for future development.