PTMViewer not running on Mac OS 10.7 and later

[cdschroer]

This has come up in a few face-to-face discussions with people, so I thought I'd post it here.  The Mac version of PTMViewer (not RTIViewer) will not run on Mac OS 10.7 or later.  The developer who ported it to the Mac told me that it requires a recompile to make it work.  The HP software is free for non-commercial use, from the HP website, but the code is not publicly available.  I think there is a plan for the software to be updated, but it's a volunteer effort by a grad student, and I don't have a date for it. When it is available it will be placed on the HP website, and we will post a note about it here.

 

RTIViewer - available from the Cultural Heritage Imaging downloads area works on the latest Mac OS's.

 

Carla

[Taylor]

I used to be able to run the PTMViewer on my Mac with OS 10.8 by running the Windows version of PTMViewer in Parallels 8 with Windows 7.  However, recently I tried it and it's not working.  I'm not certain when was the last time it worked on my Mac, but I think it might have been before I upgraded to Mac OS 10.9 ("Mavericks").  Could this upgrade from OS 10.8 to 10.9 be the reason the PTMViewer no longer seems to work, i.e., would this affect the Windows version of PTMViewer running in Parallels and Windows 7? 

 

I was using the "drag and drop" method of opening PTM files, per the HP instructions, where you drag the file with a .ptm extension that you want to view over the executable file for PTMViewer.  Now, all this does is copy the .ptm file into the PTMViewer folder.

 

Does anyone have any experience running PTMViewer in Mac OS 10.9 using Parallels or similar application?  If so, please let me know if you had any problems and if you found a workaround.

 

I haven't used PTMViewer often, but it has a couple of features that I liked, for example, the ability to relight an object from 2 directions simultaneously.  This is a little different than the Static Multi Light or Dynamic Multi Light algorithms in the RTIViewer.  In the RTI class, it was mentioned that this feature would be added to the new RTIViewer--is there a way to do this in the latest version of RTIViewer?

 

Thanks for any help offered,

Taylor

[cdschroer]

Taylor -

 

The ability to use multiple lights is a great feature of the PTMViewer, but it has not been implemented in the RTIViewer at this time.  For the 1.1 release we had a very small budget.  We implemented the 2 highest priorities we had heard from users that would fit in our budget for the release, as well as fit the skill set of the developer working on it.  I would still like to implement this feature in the future if we can get funding to do another update.

 

As for the ptmviewer, I have tried running it under VMWare Fusion and Windows 7 pro on my mac and it generally works.  I do have some issues with saving the normals visualization (output normal vectors) , but everything else seems to work as expected.

 

Carla

[leszekp]

The Inscriptifact Viewer has the ability to light an object from two directions at the same time, as well as adjust the lighting intensity independently for both sources. It's Java, though, so there may be issues on the Mac.

[Taylor]

I found I can run the Windows version of PTMViewer using Parallels and Windows 7 on a Mac with OS 10.9.  The problem I was having before was apparently related to the file sizes of the PTMs I was trying to open, which are about 400 Mb.  If I reprocess the files as LRGB PTMs so the file size is less than about 150 Mb, the drag-and-drop method of opening the file (dragging the .ptm file onto the PTMViewer executable) works fine.

 

It's a bit harder to see exactly what's happening when using multiple lights in the PTMViewer compared to the dual lights in the Inscriptifact Viewer, which provides a little more visual information about where the lights are being positioned.  However, the stand-alone Inscriptifact Viewer doesn't allow one to save the full-resolution snapshot of the file; it only allows one to save the file at the screen resolution.

 

I have a set of 36 RTIs (or PTMs) that I'd like to light consistently using dual lights at an angle of about 30 degrees positioned at 3 and 9 o'clock.  Doing this manually in the PTMViewer is a hit-and-miss and very time consuming process.  I wonder if a script can be written that will open the PTM file using the PTMViewer, apply the same light positions to each PTM, and output the resulting image to .jpg format at full resolution?  Of course, I'm not asking someone else to do this, only whether it's possible to do it.  I don't have coding experience, but I'm willing to give it a try as a way to learn.