D3PLOT 22.1

Improving Animation Performance

Improving Animation Performance

For small models this will not be a problem, but as the model size and number of states grows so you will see that animation performance degrades. This section describes how to speed up animations by reducing the load on your machine.

The key to fast animation is to reduce picture complexity, (simpler images have fewer vectors and so draw faster), and to reduce memory consumption (forcing your machine to page-fault with virtual memory usage will cripple its performance).

Choose an appropriate display mode

Clearly the time taken to draw each frame will increase in direct proportion to the number and complexity of the screen vectors used. Therefore you should aim only to display the minimum quantity necessary. The following table gives an approximate "cost" on a scale of 1 to 10 for the various display modes on OpenGL devices:

Display Mode Relative Cost
LI (LINE) 1
HI (HIDDEN-LINE) 3
CT (CONTINUOUS_TONE) 6
LC (LINE_CONTOURS) 4
VEL/VEC (VECTOR/ARROW) 5
SH (GREYSCALE SHADED) 2 (1) or 4 (2)
SI (SHADED_IMAGE)

3 (1) or 5 (2) or 10 (3)

ISO (ISO_SURFACE) 6
CL (CLOUD) 1

Notes: (1) No wireframe hidden-line overlay.
(2) With hidden-line overlay.
(3) With gouraud shading is turned off. (See SI)

Minimise contouring effort

Contouring can be especially graphics intensive and memory consuming:

  • Turn the contour resolution to Medium or Low ;
  • Use the minimum number of contour bands
  • Turn off labelling of line contours in LI plots;
  • Turn gouraud shading on for SI plots under OpenGL.

Reduce extraneous screen vectors

Turn off any extra information that is not definitely needed:

  • Element and node labels;
  • Node symbols;
  • Element local triads.

Consider simplifying the display of entities. For example each 3D spring spiral contains about 70 vectors:

  • Use "line" symbols for springs and seat-belt elements;
  • Turn off contact segment hatching (broken lines are slow to render);
  • Use free-edge or no overlay on data plots

If you are using cut-sections consider instead blanking the "unseen" parts of the model.


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