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Tools to generate static graphic images and drawings
Adobe Photoshop is a software package for editing spatial image data. The corresponding vector data editing package is Adobe Photo illustrator
AutoCAD This computer aided drawing package is great for annotated drawings. It is used widely by engineers.
Corel Photopaint and Corel Draw are the raster and vector editing packages respectively from Corel.
Tools to generate animations
Flash is used extensively to create interactive desktop products. Earlier developed by Macromedia, the product is now a part of Adobe’s software suite.
QuickTime is Apple's technology for handling video, sound, animation, graphics, text, music, and even 360-degree virtual reality scenes.
RenderMan is an image rendering program. RAT stands for RenderMan Artist Tools, a collection of tools that make using RenderMan with Maya seamless. Used primarily for creating animated films.
Advanced visualization tools: Freeware
FERRET is an interactive visualization and analysis environment designed to meet the needs of oceanographers and meteorologists analyzing large, complex gridded data sets.
GMT or Generic Mapping Tools, is a public-domain collection of ~60 UNIX tools that allow users to manipulate (x,y)and (x,y,z) data sets.
NCAR Graphics is an extensive suite of C and Fortran callable 2-D and 3-D graphics routines, accessible through five interfaces.
VisiQuest is an integrated package for data manipulation, visualization, and application development and integration. It interfaces with MATLAB and is free for educational use only.
Vis5D is a system for interactive visualization of large 5D gridded data sets (three spatial dimensions, time, and enumerated physical variables) such as those produced by numerical weather models. Vis5D has capabilities for real time animation of data.
Advanced visualization tools: Commercial
ABAQUS is a powerful finite element software package. It performs static and/or dynamic analysis and simulation on structures.
AVS or Application Visualization System can be used to make xy and contour graphs, graphical dataflow, display and manipulate 2D images and 3D objects. Examples of user contributed AVS models can be found at the International AVS Centre
Alias|Wavefront (now a part of Autodesk) can be used for modeling, animation, compositing, and rendering.
CAVE is an advanced visualization tool for creating immersive and virtual reality environments.
MATLAB is a matrix laboratory. It is very powerful for standard matrix manipulations and has tools to carry out signal and image processing, fuzzy logic, neural network, and mapping operations.
MAYA Viz provides an interface to integrate and manipulate large volumes of disparate data sets. A change to a data element in one visualization changes that element in all other visualizations.
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