SPC Symbols

SPC Symbols

These option controls the size of the symbols used to draw and contour SPC's.

Three different symbol types are provided for displaying airbag particles giving a trade-off between image quality and rendering speed.

Point

These are 2 dimensional squares drawn in the plane of the screen.

"Points" are drawn extremely fast in OpenGL, and since a typical airbag may have tens of thousands of particles this is the default display method.

Cube

This only ever shows 3 faces, so it is reasonably fast to draw, but it looks a bit odd showing a spherical element as a cube. However cubes have depth and orientation, and can be lit, so the result is better-looking that a "point".

Sphere

Spheres require many facets for rendering, making these slower to draw.

Sphere quality is a value between 1 and 5 which determines the number of facets used to render the sphere symbols. Each increment halves the equatorial and meridional angular increment size, quadrupling the number of facets on the symbol.

The default value is 2.

Fixed Size All of the SPC symbols are drawn using the same size Prop to magnitude This option can be used to automatically scale the size of the SPC symbols in proportion to the magnitude of the data value. Min (pixels) This specified the minimum size used when scaling SPC symbols in proportion to the magnitude of the data value. Max (pixels) This specified the maximum size used when scaling SPC symbols in proportion to the magnitude of the data value.

These options can be used to control the size of the arrows used when generating vector plots of SPC forces. Arrow Length This is the maximum length used to draw the arrows used for vector plots. Line Thickness This option can be used to increase the width of the lines used to draw the arrows. Fixed Length By default the length of each arrow is scaled by the magnitude of the data value. If this option is selected then all the arrows will be drawn the same length and just the colour of the arrow will be used to indicate the value. This option can be useful if there is a large variation between values and the arrows for the smaller values are difficult to see. Changing any of these values will affect all vector plots (e.g. Velocity)