Limitations

Limitations

D3PLOT Viewer export has the following limitations:

• Solid, thick shell, shell and beam elements are exported; other element types are not
• SH, CT and SI plot modes can be captured; other plotting modes revert to SH plot
• Contour values are only exported as a single value at each node, so only low and medium resolution contour modes are supported. GLB files written with contour mode set to unaveraged or high resolution will be captured at medium resolution
• Exporting cut sections is not currently supported and cut-sections are automatically disabled prior to exporting 3D output and then enabled again on completion

Additionally, there are limits to how much data can be read in by D3PLOT Viewer due to browser limitations. Uncompressed GLB files are limited to 2GB of data and any file larger than this is not able to be read by D3PLOT Viewer. Standard (compressed) GLB files can contain around 4GB of uncompressed data as their file size will be considerably smaller, but note that performance of D3PLOT Viewer will be impacted by large amounts of uncompressed data.

Contouring Faces with Contraflexure

When contouring quad faces with "contraflexure", where nodes on one pair of diagonally opposite corners both have higher values than the other two nodes, D3PLOT creates a point at the element centre with a value equal to the average of the node values and then subdivides the quad face into four triangles for drawing (see diagram below).

When a contoured model is exported to GLB format, quad faces are simply split into two triangles, which are then contoured based on the node values only, i.e. the element centre value is not included (see diagram below). This simpler approach reduces the complexity of the GLB file and also reduces the file size. When viewing contour plots in a large model, the differences are unlikely to be noticeable, however when viewed across a small number of elements, differences in contour patterns may be visible, as illustrated for a single quad face in the diagram below. The GLB representation is not technically incorrect, it is simply a different approach. Importantly, it does preserve the peak values, so, although the detail of the contour pattern may differ slightly from D3PLOT, the peak values will remain the same.