NHSE Software Catalog

Surface Evolver

url

ftp://ftp.geom.umn.edu/pub/software/evolver/evolver.tar.Z

abstract

The Surface Evolver is an interactive program for the study of surfaces
shaped by surface tension. Given an initial surface, the Evolver can evolve
it toward minimal energy. The energy can be surface tension, gravitational
energy, squared mean curvature, or user-defined surface integrals. The
Evolver can handle arbitrary topology (as seen in real soap bubble
clusters), volume constraints, boundary constraints, boundary contact
angles, prescribed mean curvature, crystalline integrands, gravity, and
constraints expressed as surface integrals. The surface can be in an
arbitrary dimensional Riemannian space with a metric, and the space can
be a quotient space under a group action. The Evolver was written for one
and two dimensional surfaces, but it can do higher dimensional surfaces
with some restrictions on the features available.

description

http://www.geom.umn.edu/docs/software/viz/evolver/evolver.html

contact

brakke@geom.umn.edu

keywords

computational geometry

environment

NeXT, Mac, Intel 386/486

comments

The Evolver is written in portable C and has been run on several systems:
Sun, Iris, NeXT, Xenix, Cray, MS-DOS, and HP 98731.