Spyview - An Unstructured Grid Visualizer

Rendering Options:

The mesh can be rendered with the outside polygons in place or just a wire mesh, and with different smoothing options. A decreased crease angle implies smoothing of edges that meet at sharper angles.

Scene Options:

The scene options refer to the visual environment surrounding the mesh such as the colors of the background, foreground, and text.

Field Mapping Options:

Automatically set max/min may be useful because the extremes of the field values often change across timesteps.

Deformation exaggeration can be used to look at otherwise unnoticable changes in the structure of the mesh across timesteps.

Isosurfaces and Cutplanes:

Spyview can draw isosurfaces and cutplanes and paint them with any field in the database. Isosurfaces can be placed one at a time at specified field values or at some proportion of the field between the min and max. Alternately, several surfaces can be placed automatically at equally spaced intervals in the field. Entering a number for the equally spaced isosurfs removes all surfaces that were previously placed as a proportion, but leaves the isosurfaces that were placed by value alone.

Cutplanes can also be added by specifying a point in the unit box and a vector normal to that point. In order to eliminate rendering artifacts associated with large elements, the cutplane can be refined several times. Each refinement increases the resolution of the rendering by a factor of four, so large values are generally not useful and may be computationally expensive.

Use the Fields tab to specify which fields are painted on the isosurfaces and cutplanes.

Sets:

In multiblock exodus files, any block(s) can be disabled so that the others may be viewed alone or more closely. Nodesets or sidesets are rendered as a collection of spheres, on on each node, face or edge. The size of the spheres can be specified using the radius command.

Vectors:

At present, vectors may be placed on every node, on the nodes of a nodeset, on the vertices of an isosurfaces, or on the vertices of a dataframe (see next section). The look of the vectors can be altered and vectors can be skipped (e.g., for rendering on the nodes of a highly refined mesh).

Dataframe:

Dataframes can be a powerful tool for finding data in specific locations, but for large meshes, can be fairly expensive computationally because it may be difficult to determine which element contains the points. As the mesh deforms, the datapoints remain fixed in space.

Element Highlighting and Other Options:

Individual elements or nodes can be highlighted for use in debugging or analysis. Elements are outlined in red and nodes are highlighted by spheres. In order to highlight a large number of elements, a list can be read from an ASCII file.

Viewing Options:

The perspective and other viewing options can be altered using the view tab on the control panel. Alternately, the image can be rotated using the left mouse button and scaled using the right mouse button.

Image Saving Options:

Image Composition:

Using the tabs and compositing functionality, multiple images from different analyes can be merged into a single image. In order to merge images, load the meshes you want to merge into separate tabs and position them as you would like them to appear in the final composited image. Open the composition dialog using the compose button below the graphical window. View each tab and click the compose image into buffer button to merge the image into the originally empty buffer. When you have done all your composition, or when you want to see what is currently in the buffer, open a new tab and press the show buffered image button. This image can then be saved or viewed. In order to erase the composition you have done and start anew, press the clear buffered images button.

Note: the image produced by the show buffered image command is just an image, not an object, so it cannot be rotated or altered and it may not reappear when you move to another tab and then back. It is still in the buffer, so just redisplay it using the show buffered image button when you want to see or save it. Also, don't try to resize the screen between merges. That doesn't work and it doesn't make sense either.

Automated Scripts

Spy Definition Files

The Spy Library