Title

Description

Cutting plane

Cutting plane functions have been expanded to allow three planes to be active simultaneously.  Cutting plane control is more interactive and is controlled by selecting any of the active planes with the mouse and then dragging the plane across the model.  The cutting plane feature can be found in the Hidden Line, Contour, and Animation panels.

Isosurfaces

The isosurfaces subpanel is available on the Contour and Animation panels.  Isosurfaces can be displayed on a model in either a legend-based mode in which each of the legend colors generates an isosurface, or as a value-based surface in which you specify a value that indicates where an isosurface should be displayed.

Hidden components

If one or more of the components in a model are set to a display style besides wireframe, then HyperForm draws the whole model in hidden line. To perform this task, HyperForm relies on the z-buffer found on your graphics device.  The z-buffer allows HyperForm to render your model in hidden line, with the elements in back eliminated from the display.  There are some limitations to using a z-buffer and some display output differences of which you should be aware.

One problem with using the z-buffer technology is that if two entities lie in the same location in space, or nearly the same location in space, the z-buffer may have difficulty deciding which entity to display.  If this situation occurs, you might see a "dotting"  or "stitching" effect where the z-buffer considers one entity to be closer to you at one pointer, and then another entity closer to you at another.  Potential areas of z-buffer stitching are in the Features, Edges, and Faces panels.  Here, since HyperForm is creating entities that reside in the same location in space as another entity, the display lines which represent the edges (for example) might be partially or completely blocked out by the original entity in the database.  If this occurs, you can turn the z-buffer off by making all of the components in your model wireframe.  In some cases, it may help to use the shrink option (modeling subpanel on the Options panel).

When a component is set to hidden line, the interior is filled with solid color.  This can make it very difficult to see a node.  To correct this situation, the graphics engine draws all selected or temporary nodes as spheres when one or more components are set to a display attribute other than wireframe.

Optimization

The graphics engine optimizes the display of your finite element model.  One of the optimizations is the removal of interior solid faces.  If you have solid elements in your model, HyperForm calculates where the external faces are in your model, and displays these instead of displaying all of the faces.

Memory usage

HyperForm graphics use some memory.  If swapping occurs while you are running HyperForm, this could seriously affect performance.  If you encounter this problem, you should obtain more system memory.