SHAPE Questions

In order to understand the context of the discussion I am going to lay out here, please view the following video made by the makers of SHAPE v. 5 ​Shape Version 5 - External Data Visualization. Back in March I met with Marcus at RIT, and we worked on this together. What I will be detailing here are comparable results to what we saw. However we were really too excited that we saw something, and thus we weren't super skeptical of the results.

Attached to this blog post I have included two .dat files, or ascii files, from Martin's directory — in case anyone wants to download Shape, follow the video, and try to find it out. They are titled SHAPE00000.dat and SHAPE00022.dat.

Video Summary

1. Open Shape. Go to the 3D Module. Insert a "mesh" by clicking either sphere, torus, etc. The point of this is to "hold" the external data on some shape.

2. Rename your Shape, and choose what file format you want. We are using ascii.

3. Input properties dialog.

Questions & Concerns:

  1. What is dNum ? The narrator in the video says that it takes a "slice" of the data. Does this mean that you only consider a certain number of rows in your data? Why 256, why 1? Especially when you are only inputting a single frame of your data. There is also this parameter n in the input properties dialog. Wouldn't these be the same thing based on what the narrator has said?
  1. The narrator says that n is the "lines per entry" in the data. However wouldn't we just have 1 row based on how people typically use file I/O? When you expand the input parameters dialog box, the data you can see will adjust with the box.
  1. For any data set that I obtain I will need to know the format string, or the label for all of the columns in the data. I didn't ask Martin what his labels are, however Marcus and myself made an educated guess about what they could be.
  1. The narrator says that one needs to put a dummy variable at the end of their string. Why do we need a dummy variable if we know all of the columns?
  1. The Center… how do you know how your data is centered? Then there are extents. Marcus and I sort of played around with this. You can also adjust the radius of the mesh object from Step 1 above to see what makes sense for how your data looks.

4. Delete the modifiers already there in the 3D Module (Density, Temperature).

5. Add the emissions species by accessing the Physics Module.

Questions & Concerns:

  1. In doing this I have always followed the instructions given by the narrator in the tutorial. I don't think that this is part of the problem when trying to visualize external data in Shape. I say this because we are actually able to "see" something, which I'll illustrate at the end of the blog post.
  1. When do you know what species to use? One will probably need to know if their simulation requires a particular emission.

6. Apply the species modifer.

7. Now go to the Render module.

This is what the data looks like originally if you use comparable parameters from the video.

However if you change the width of the Image, it starts to look like a sphere…

And if you change the center (in the input parameters dialog) you simply just move around the mesh.

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