Introduction

This document describes a library of routines, called the BIC Graphics library, available at the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre at the Montreal Neurological Institute. It was developed as part of a medical imaging software testbed by David MacDonald. The library is comprised of a set of functions for performing interactive 3D graphics operations, by calling Silicon Graphics GL library functions. The philosophy involved is to provide a level of generic graphics routines that are not tied to any particular vendor's graphics library, such as SGI GL. The user of the BIC Graphics library receives two benefits:

Easy Graphics

By removing the details of the SGI GL from the user, and providing a simple programmers interface for doing basic interactive graphics, the user can quickly create interactive graphics programs.

Portability

User applications that use the BIC Graphics library are automatically portable to all systems on which the BIC Graphics library is supported. At present, this consists of only the Silicon Graphics GL system, but plans for eventual ports include the X and OpenGL systems, both of which will be available on almost any UNIX workstation.

This document describes where to find the BIC Graphics library, what functionality is provided, and how to integrate it into a user's programs. The library is written in C source code, and is designed to be linked with C source. The library uses types and calls functions from two other MNI libraries, the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre Volume IO library (BIC Volume IO Library) and the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre Programming library (BIC Programming Library). In order to understand and use the BIC Graphics library, the user should be familiar with these two libraries, for which separate documents exist.