CrashViewer in general

The application crashViewer has been developed as testing-platform to implement various functions in the range of pre- and postprocessing of crashsimulations. The crashViewer has been implemented in C++ and consists of various modules, the most important are presented in the following:

• Viewer is the central application module and takes on the interaction control. As GUI (graphical user interface) X11/Motif is used presently to enable the user to make entries via dialogboxes and menus. The presentation-window is based on the high-level-graphics library Cosmo3D/OpenGL Optimizer.
• Reader combines varios libraries for the input of pre- and postprocessing data. From here the necessary data of the given fileformats is transformed into an internal, objectoriented datastructure.
• GeoBuilder represents the part of the aplication that initialises objects to be displayed of the internal data with the aid of high-level-3D-graphic-APIs. So far the simulationmodel can be converted to scenegraphs for Open Inventor and Cosmo 3D which are then being traversed for the interactive display.
• Func contains the algorithms needed by the various functionalities at pre- and postprocessing.

This picture shows the surface of crashViewer. The user interacts via 2D- or 3D-mouse, keyboard, bitmap-buttons, menus and dialog-boxes.

General Functionalities

• Each scene can be saved in the binary csb-fileformat and be restored again.
• Current settings as well as position of camera, backgroundcolor etc. can be saved in an environment-file and restored again in a later session.
• There are various functions to choose the camera-setting, among others standard views and the search for and display of points, nodes, elements or components.
• Components can be selectively blinded out or displayed via mouseclick or their ID.
• Single (if necessary high-resolution) snapshots can be made of the currently displayed view. Furthermore a record-mode can also be activated that allows the creation of digital videos.
• The scene can be (temporarily) restricted to some part interesting for the user, to do this either the selection-objects (box, sphere) or the viewing-frustum of the current camera-setting can be used. For complex models this results in a significant increase of image frequency.
• For the rendering various culling-techniques can be activated.
• The representation of geometry can be made more efficient by optimization-steps (as quadrilateral-stripping or decimation of polygons).
• Finally many standard-settings can be preset in an initialization-file.