FrameView: Object-Oriented Visualization System for Frame Analysis

Abstract

Rapidly developing desktop computing capabilities, which include high resolution graphics and interactive graphical user interfaces, are leading to a new generation of engineering software. One of the challenges in engineering software development is the effective use of computer graphics for visualization of data. Object-oriented methodologies hold the greatest promise to support reuse and rapid prototyping for large-scale software development. This paper outlines some of the essential characteristics of FrameView, an object-oriented software system for visualization of responses from any type of frame analysis model. FrameView provides a graphical user interface that is based on the X-Window system and Motif. The graphics library used is PEX, which is a three-dimensional (3D) extension to the X-Window system. The programming language used is C++. Important attributes of PEX, and tedious programming details required when using PEX, have been encapsulated in a number of classes. General classes are developed to abstract the tools needed for viewing frame-element responses and two-dimensional (2D) and 3D graphics modeling. Viewing of results from 2D frame elements based on an assumed cubic transverse displacement field for drawing the deflected shape, and an assumed linear function for any other general response quantities along the element length, have been incorporated in FrameView. An example of how FrameView has been extended to handle other graphical representations of frame-element responses is discussed.