UTILITIES, COARSEN

Mesh coarsening is designed to improve the graphics speed of large and finely meshed models. It works by grouping adjacent elements into "patches" and hence sending fewer rendering requests down the graphics pipeline.

It results in a slight loss of image quality, but this is usually acceptable and by default D3PLOT reverts to the original (fine) mesh when you zoom in to look at details.

By default (i.e. if you don't use "Custom" settings) coarsening does the following:

• Only polygon fill (i.e. shaded, "fuzzy" shaded image and hidden infill) is coarsened.
• Wireframe and hidden overlay are not coarsened.
• Coarsening is based on the last state in the analysis.
• Zooming in by a factor of more than 4x the auto-scaled scale reverts to using the original mesh.

Coarsening is fully automatic, with no user intervention required unless you want to change the default settings.

By default Coarsening is not active, but you can modify this with the d3plot*auto_coarsen "oa_pref" file option so that large models are automatically coarsened when opened. See Appendix B for more information.