FEVIEW - AN INTERACTIVE VISUALIZATION TOOL FOR FINITE-ELEMENTS

This paper presents a finite element visualization facility, FEView, w hich has been implemented based upon an object-oriented graphics libra ry. The visualization tool works as an external module to an interacti ve program Geomview for viewing and manipulating geometric objects. Th e graphical user interface has been built on top of the Forms Library, a graphical user interface toolkit for Silicon Graphics workstations. A finite element mesh can be considered as a collection of faces with edges, wire frame, or point cloud, and the corresponding numerical re sults gained through finite element analyses can be visualized via col or shading and field icons (such as arrows) on the geometric shapes. A lso, a scalar field can be represented as a weather map to highlight c olor shading domains with scalar values falling into the range of inte rest. Numerical results for two-dimensional cases can be shown with th ree-dimensional effects by using values of the scalar field. FEView pr ovides animation control over single frame stepping and adjustable spe ed playing. It has been equipped with geometry operation functionality , in which a particular part of an object can be obtained by specifyin g material indices, element numbers, and cutting boxes. In local analy sis mode, FEView is able to provide local information about finite ele ment objects by picking up the position of interest via mouse manipula tion.