Vis5D Documentation
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# Controlling vis5d

The topmost group of buttons in the control panel operate the main functions of vis5d. Some will be discussed in more detail later.

ANIMATE | This toggle button turns animation on or off. Use the left or middle mouse buttons for forward animation and the right mouse button for reverse animation. Does not appear when viewing data sets with one time step. To make the animation slower or faster, hit the S and F key on the keyboard while the mouse cursor is inside the 3-D viewing window.
STEP | This button has three possible uses depending on which mouse button is pressed: Left Button - Step ahead one time step Middle Button - Go to first time step. Right Button - Backward one time step. This button does not appear when viewing data sets with one time step.
NEW VAR | Used to duplicate physical variables or invoke external analysis functions. This is explained further in section 6.13.
EXIT | Exit the program. A window will appear to ask you to verify your decision.
TEXTURE | Toggles display of texture maps on/off if they are loaded. See section 6.15 for more information.
TOP | Depending on which mouse button is pressed: Left or Middle: Reset the 3-D window to the default top-view. Right: Set the 3-D window to a bottom-view.
SOUTH | Depending on which mouse button is pressed: Left or Middle: Set 3-D window to a south-view. Right: Set 3-D window to a north-view.
WEST | Depending on which mouse button is pressed: Left or Middle: Set 3-D window to a west-view. Right: Set 3-D window to an east-view.
TOPO | Toggle the display of topography. This button will not appear if the topography file was not found. Click on TOPO with the right mouse button to edit the topography color.
MAP | Toggle the display of map lines. This button will not appear if the map file was not found. Click on MAP with the right mouse button to edit the color of the map lines.
BOX | Toggle the display of the 3-D box.
CLOCK | Toggle the display of the clock.
SAVE | Save current graphics and colors. After you've setup a variety of isosurfaces, slice, wind trajectories and colors it is useful to be able to save them and restore them the next time the data set is visualized. You'll be prompted for a filename. The file format, as of Vis5D 4.2 is a Tcl script. See section 6.16 for more information. Using the right mouse button when clicking on this button will allow the current vis5d data set to be saved to a file in the v5d format. See section 6.21 .
RESTORE | Restore the information save with the SAVE button. See section 6.16 for more information.
GRID #s | Normally the bounds of the data set in latitude, longitude and kilometers are displayed along the edges of the box. Use this button to display the numbers in grid coordinates instead.
CONT #s | The numbers which are drawn on contour line slices can be toggled on or off with this button.
[ANIM-REC] | This button works just like ANIMATE but allows fast animations on system with slow 3-D rendering. After each time step is rendered the image is saved in memory. When the animation loop repeats the images are quickly copied from memory to the 3-D window resulting in a faster animation.
REVERSE | Normally, the 3-D box and clock are drawn in white on a black background. This option reverses that and draws a black box and clock on a white background. This is useful for making paper print outs.
SAVE PIC | Used to save the image in the 3-D or sounding window to a file. When the 'Sounding' mode is chosen from the radio widgets the sounding window will be saved. If any other mode such as 'Normal' or 'Slice' is chosen the 3-D window (including all displays if multiple displays exist) will be saved. Depending on what system you're using a number of different picture file formats are supported. On SGI systems be sure you have the 'tops', 'frombin', and 'togif' program installed from your IRIX CD-ROM. When using OpenGL on SGIs the 'fromxwd' program is also needed. Unfortunately there is a bug in this program which often causes it to fail. Included with vis5d however is a patched version of fromxwd. An alternate way of insuring more save formats is to download ImageMagick's 'convert' program. See section 6.14 .
PERSPEC | Toggle between perspective and orthogonal viewing projections.
SCRIPT | Used to run Vis5D Tcl scripts. When you click on this button a file request will appear in which you can select the Tcl script to run. For more information see section 6.16 .
INTERP | Starts the Vis5D interactive interpreter. In your shell window you may then enter Tcl commands. Vis5D will be suspended while the interpreter is active. Type 'exit' to exit the interpreter. For more information see section 6.16 .
UVW VARS | Opens a window in which you can specify the names of the variables to use for computing trajectories and wind slices.
LEGENDS | Toggles the display of colorbar legends in the 3-D window.
IMPORT | Invokes the import utility program for bringing new data sets into a Vis5D session. For more information see section 7.1 and section 7.2 .
DISPLAY | Opens a window which allows you manipulate the assignment of data sets to display windows and change various values associated with display windows. For more information see section 6.20 .

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