Field

Description

Background

Provides three options for color selection for the viewport background, black, gray, or white. This option is particularly useful when creating screen bitmap dumps.

Font Size

Selects a font size to use with all of the viewport windows. Currently there are only six helvetica fonts to choose from which range between 10 and 20 point.

Mirror Mode

For models with symmetry boundary conditions can use the Mirror Mode option to display solution on complete geometry by reflecting the solution and mesh about a selected plane of symmetry.

Stereo

Switches between normal (color) graphics, and a black-and-white 3D stereo image similar to old three dimensional movies. The use of this option requires inexpensive red-blue glasses (not provided with PHLEX). Glasses can be purchased from various sources.

Transparency Ratio

Sets the density of transparent surfaces (isosurfaces and slices in "transp" or "fog" mode, or the model boundary in transparent mode). A high value will create almost opaque surfaces, while a low value allows lots of "see-through".

Mouse Mode

Allows you to assign /reset the mouse controls.

Transparency Mode

Switches between "screen-door" transparency, and "true" alpha-transparency mode. Currently there are no graphics drivers with both modes implemented: XT mode uses screen-door, while OpenGL uses alpha transparency.

Transparency Sorting

To obtain realistic images, all transparent polygons have to be sorted from the back to the front of the screen. This sorting has to be done in software, and can considerably slow down the graphics for large models. Turning off transparency sorting speeds up the graphics at the expense of the image quality. It is advisable to switch to non-transparent mode rather than use this option.

Polygon Offset Ext    

OpenGL was designed for photo-realistic images, and has difficulty in properly drawing lines on surfaces (e.g. boundary mesh on the solid model). Without the Polygon Offset Extension these lines will be usually drawn as discontinuous "stitches" (see Figure below), partially in front of the surface, and partially behind it (hidden). There is currently no "foolproof" way to control that functionality, as it depends on the model size and on the particular implementation of the graphics hardware. By default, this field contains two numbers: "1.5 1e-6". When the display of the solid mesh is unsatisfactory, your can experimentally adjust these numbers, usually by simply changing the exponent of the second number in the field. Some rules of thumb for adjusting the numbers include:  1. with discontinuous edges: increase the second value;  2. when the image shows edges which should not be visible: decrease it. Turns the color bar on and off, automatically scaled.