The Geant4 Visualisation System - a multi-driver graphics system

Abstract

From the beginning the Geant4 Visualisation System was designed to support several simultaneous graphics systems written to common abstract interfaces. Today it has matured into a powerful diagnostic and presentational tool. It comes with a library of models that may be added to the current scene and which include the representation of the Geant4 geometry hierarchy, simulated trajectories and user-written hits and digitisations. The workhorse is the OpenGL suite of drivers for X, Xm, Qt and Win32. There is an Open Inventor driver. Scenes can be exported in special graphics formats for offline viewing in the DAWN, VRML, HepRApp and gMocren browsers. PostScript can be generated through OpenGL, Open Inventor, DAWN and HepRApp. Geant4's own tracking algorithms are used by the Ray Tracer. Not all drivers support all features but all drivers bring added functionality of some sort. This paper describes the interfaces and details the individual drivers.