In this section we will first review the characteristics of a volume, show how these parameters are set and queried and then explain the basics of loading data from a file or a block of memory. At this point, if you are able to get your data loaded, you may want to skip to the next section and learn about how to control the data range and color mapping. However if your data is very large you should read the subsections about LDM format and converting to LDM format. The following subsections go into more detail about handling some specific file formats including DICOM for medical scanner data and SEGY for seismic data. You may want to read just the sub-section for your data format. Finally we will discuss how VolumeViz handles histogram data.