Analysis refers to software intended to analyze data, whether it be mathematical, instrumental, quantitative, or qualitative. This category includes many research and statistical packages as well as graphing tools for showing data trends and correlations.
Modeling software focuses on the digital creation or the digital re-creation of a design. Modeling software allows for digital simulation to explore possibilities, theories, and simulate results. It also allows for easy viewing of the design from perspectives that would otherwise be difficult.
This category includes mapping tools, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) tools, plotting tools, landscape analysts, and geological structure tool. Also included is Software for statistical gathering, analysis, computation, and visualization. Often used in research, polling, or surveying.
Availability: Faculty/Staff
Adobe Fuse CC (Preview) is a 3D modeling app that allows users to create human characters for use in Adobe Photoshop CC images, designs and prototypes. 3D characters can be built using a library of customizable faces, bodies, clothing, and textures. The character’s size and proportions can be changed via slider and other attributes will adjust accordingly.
Availability: Download
Adobe Scout is a SWF profiling tool designed for Adobe Flash game developers. SWF files on either mobile devices or in the browser can be profiled with no change to the code, and performance problems can be detected.
Adobe After Effects is a digital motion graphics, visual effects and compositing app developed by Adobe Systems used in the post-production process of filmmaking and television production. After Effects can also be used as a basic non-linear editor and a media transcoder.
Adobe After Effects is primarily used for creating motion graphics and visual effects. After Effects allows users to animate, alter and composite media in 2D and 3D space with various built-in tools and third party plug-ins, as well as individual attention to variables like parallax and user-adjustable angle of observation.
After Effects and some non-linear editing systems (NLEs) are layer-oriented, meaning that each individual media object (video clip, audio clip, still image, etc.) occupies its own track. In contrast, other NLEs use a system where individual media objects can occupy the same track as long as they do not overlap in time. This track-oriented system is more suited for editing and can keep project files much more concise. The layer-oriented system that After Effects adopts is suited for extensive effects work and keyframing. Although other compositing packages, especially ones that employ tree or node workflows, such as Nukeand eyeon Fusion are better suited to manage large volumes of objects within a composite, After Effects is able to counter the clutter somewhat by selectively hiding layers (using the Shy switch) or by grouping them into pre-compositions.
The main interface consists of several panels (windows in versions prior to After Effects 7.0). Three of the most commonly used panels are the Project panel, the Composition panel, and the Timeline panel. The Project panel acts as a bin to import stills, video, and audio footage items. Footage items in the Project panel are used in the Timeline panel, where layer order and timing can be adjusted. The items visible at the current time marker are displayed in the Composition panel.
After Effects shares many features with other Adobe programs, such as creating circles, squares and free form shapes that are defined by bezier curves. Like Photoshop and Illustrator, After Effects can import and manipulate many image formats, and filters and adjustments can be added.
After Effects integrates with other Adobe software titles such as Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Encore, Flash, and third-party 3D programs like Cinema 4D, Lightwave 3D, and Autodesk 3ds Max.
ALOHA (Area Locations of Hazardous Atmospheres) is a software program designed to model chemical releases for emergency responders and planners. With help from ALOHA, users can calculate how quickly chemicals are escaping from various locations. The program also allows users to model hazardous scenarios.
With the help of ALOHA, you can calculate how quickly chemicals are escaping from tanks, puddles (on both land and water), and gas pipelines and predict how that release rate changes over time.
The program generates a variety of scenario-specific outputs, including threat zone plots, threats at specific locations, and source strength graphs. You can then display threat zones on MARPLOT maps (and on ArcView and ArcMap with the Arc Tool extensions).
Atlas Ti is a program used for qualitative research or qualitative data analysis. The software is used to uncover and analyze complex phenomena hidden in unstructured data. Users can extract, categorize, and interlink data segments from multiple source documents, audio clips or photos.
AutoCAD is a commercial software application for 2D and 3D computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting — available since 1982 as a desktop application and since 2010 as a mobile web- and cloud-based app marketed as AutoCAD 360.
AutoCAD is used across a wide range of industries, by architects, project managers, engineers, designers, and other professionals. It is supported by 750 training centers worldwide as of 1994.
The native file format of AutoCAD is .dwg. This and, to a lesser extent, its interchange file format DXF, have become de facto, if proprietary, standards for CAD data interoperability.[citation needed] AutoCAD has included support for .dwf, a format developed and promoted by Autodesk, for publishing CAD data.
Blender is a free and open source 3D animation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. Advanced users employ Blender’s API for Python scripting to customize the application and write specialized tools; often these are included in Blender’s future releases. Blender is well suited to individuals and small studios who benefit from its unified pipeline and responsive development process. Examples from many Blender-based projects are available in the showcase.
Blender is cross-platform and runs equally well on Linux, Windows and Macintosh computers. Its interface uses OpenGL to provide a consistent experience. To confirm specific compatibility, the list of supported platformsindicates those regularly tested by the development team.
As a community-driven project under the GNU General Public License (GPL), the public is empowered to make small and large changes to the code base, which leads to new features, responsive bug fixes, and better usability. Blender has no price tag, but you can invest, participate, and help to advance a powerful collaborative tool: Blender is your own 3D software.
The Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is both a repository and a validated and curated resource for the three-dimensional structural data of molecules generally containing at least carbon and hydrogen, comprising a wide range of organic, metal-organic and organometallic molecules. The specific entries are complementary to the other crystallographic databases such as the PDB, ICSD and PDF. The data, typically obtained by X-ray crystallography and less frequently by neutron diffraction, and submitted by crystallographers and chemists from around the world, are freely accessible (as deposited by authors) on the Internet via the CSD’s parent organization’s website (CCDC,Repository). The CSD is overseen by the not-for-profit incorporated company called the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, CCDC.Read more…
Celestia is a free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A ‘point-and-goto’ interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit. Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that’s not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.
ChemDraw is a chemistry software tool that helps chemists create scientifically intelligent drawings for databases and publications. A free trial download and purchasable download is available for Windows and Mac devices. Some features of ChemDraw include:
Produced by Exelis, ENVI (ENvironment for Visualizing Images) is a software application used to process and analyze geospatial imagery. This program is used mostly by image analysts and GIS professionals. ENVI can also integrate with ArcGIS from Esri.Read more…
Esri’s ArcGIS is a geographic information system (GIS) for working with maps and geographic information. Users can research maps, images, geo databases, and tools, as a web service.Read more…
Availability: Windows Labs | Faculty/Staff | Download
Microsoft Excel is the spreadsheet application in the Microsoft Office Suite. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications. It has been a very widely applied spreadsheet for these platforms. Excel also facilitates basic statistical functions and data visualization. Excel is available on the MacOS and Windows platforms.
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Fathom software can be used to teach data analysis and statistics and help students understand algebra, precalculus and statistics. Users can represent data in a variety of graphs, bar charts, scatter plots, function plots, and histograms. The software’s data analysis capabilities make it a tool that can be used for the physical and biological sciences, as well as for social science courses.
View the full features list.
Adobe Flash (formerly called Macromedia Flash and Shockwave Flash) is a multimedia and software platform used for creating vector graphics, animation, games and rich Internet applications (RIAs) that can be viewed, played and executed in Adobe Flash Player. Flash is frequently used to add streamed video or audio players, advertisement and interactive multimedia content to web pages, although usage of Flash on websites is declining.
Flash manipulates vector and raster graphics to provide animation of text, drawings, and still images. It allows bidirectional streaming of audio and video, and it can capture user input via mouse, keyboard, microphone and camera. Flash applications and animations can be programmed using the object-oriented language called ActionScript.
Adobe Flash Studio is the official Adobe authoring tool for creating the Flash content, which also allows automation via the JavaScript Flash language (JSFL). Flash Studio is included in the Adobe Creative Suite for Windows and Mac OS.
Adobe Flash Player makes the Flash content accessible on various operating systems such as Windows, OS X and Linux, and is available free of charge for common web browsers (as a plug-in) under a few of the major operating systems, some smartphones and tablets, and a few other electronic devices using Flash Lite.
The Flash Player installed in all Windows and Mac labs, and is installed by default on all faculty and staff computers. Flash Studio is a part of the Adobe Creative Suite Design and Web Premium. UNCC has a site license for all faculty and staff computers and it is available for installation upon request.
FRAGSTATS is a computer software program designed to compute a wide variety of landscape metrics for categorical map patterns. It interfaces with ArcGIS and supports and a variety of sampling methods for analyzing sub-landscapes. It accepts raster images in a variety of formats, including ASCII grid, 8-, 16- and 32-bit integer grids, ESRI grid (or raster), GeoTIFF grid, VTP binary terrain format grid, ESRI header labelled grid, ERDAS Imagine grid, PCRaster grid, and SAGA GIS binary format grid. Support for the latter six image formats is via the GDAL library.
Here is the FragStats official website.
GEMPAK, the GEneral Meteorology PAcKage, is an analysis, display, and product generation package for meteorological data. It is developed by NCEP (the National Centers for Environmental Prediction) for use by the National Centers (Storm Prediction Center (SPC), Tropical Prediction Center (TPC), Aviation Weather Center (AWC), Hydrologic Prediction Center (HPC), Marine Prediction Center (MPC), Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), etc.) in producing operational forecast and analysis products such as those distributed as Redbook Graphics and others displayed on the NWS web pages and utilized internally within the centers. Graphical User Interfaces provide convenient access to interactive data manipulation. A comprehensive set of decoders enables integration of real-time and archive data, products, and bulletins. The GEMPAK distribution consists of a suite of application programs, Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), meteorologic computation libraries, graphic display interfaces, and device drivers for the decoding, analysis, display and diagnosis of geo-referenced and meteorological data.
GEOrient plots and analyses stereographic projections and rose diagrams of geological structural data. Sources can be copied and pasted from other applications or read from text files. Wind rose options include plotting mean wind data (wind speed/wind frequency/wind energy).
GNUPlot is a command-line program that can generate two- and three-dimensional plots of functions, data, and data fits.
