Visualisation tools

Application see

Normally, the application see has been built as the same time than rockable. The application see needs freeglut, the simplest way to use openGL and display 3D things. see allows for the visualisation of conf-file (including an input-file).

Usage

Here is the console output when typing see --help:

USAGE:

   ../../BUILD/see  [-v <int>] [-t <string>] [--] [--version] [-h]
                    <conf-file>


Where:

   -v <int>,  --verbose <int>
     Verbose level

   -t <string>,  --traj <string>
     Name of a trajectory file

   --,  --ignore_rest
     Ignores the rest of the labeled arguments following this flag.

   --version
     Displays version information and exits.

   -h,  --help
     Displays usage information and exits.

   <conf-file>
     Name of the conf-file


   Visualisation of Rockable simulations

So, to visualise a conf-file you can use its name

see input.txt

or simply invoke see with no other argument, and the default one will be conf0.

In the window, the key k lists all the key bindings, and h the use of the mouse. The keys 0 to 5 choose how the particles are colored: uniform, random, by velocity, by shape, and, for soft particles (see Deformable particles (DCEM)), by their volume change \(\det \mathbf{F} - 1\) and by their mean stress. The soft particles are drawn with their deformation. The cheatsheet see_rockable_cheatsheet (folder cheatsheets) describes every key and the settings of see.json. The driven bodies (the walls, a container) can be made transparent with the keys a and A: they are then drawn after the free bodies, so that the grains inside a box or a tube can be seen through its walls.

Application conftovtk

conftovtk converts the conf-files into VTK files, to be visualised with ParaView. It converts every file named conf<number> of the current folder (the conf-file given on the command line is not used, and a file such as conf10.txt is not converted), and writes, for each of them:

File	Content
`Shepres####.vtk`	The particles whose shape is a single vertex (spheres). The name is spelt this way in the source.
`Polyr####.vtk`	The particles with more than two vertices (polyhedra), with their faces. The soft particles are written with their deformation.
`Forces####.vtk`	The contact forces, at the contact points: the vectors `Fn` (normal force) and `Ft` (tangential force), and `MeanRadius`, which holds, along `z`, half the sum of the Minkowski radii of the two bodies (it was named `F_Fmax` before October 2026, although it is not a force).
`OBB####.vtk`	The oriented bounding boxes of the particles.

The particles with exactly two vertices (sticks) are not written.

conftovtk

Application seer (Dear My Seer)

Dear My Seer is the visualization application meant to replace see in Rockable. It is built with the CMake option ROCKABLE_COMPILE_SEER, which is off by default, so see remains the default viewer. The old see application uses freeglut and thus X11, which made maintenance difficult, especially on Apple computers. The console-name seer stands for see-rockable, and since this new version uses Dear ImGui, it has been named Dear My Seer as a playful wordplay.

Note

If you were using see, you will only need to slightly change your habits by adding an r at the end of see.

Thanks to Dear ImGui, many features are now accessible through a modern and intuitive interface, using the mouse for a smoother experience.

Dear My Seer is based on Rockable’s input format, meaning it can be used with other DEM applications. All you need to do is provide the configuration file (conf-file) in the correct format (this is what ExaDEM already does).

Application shape (Dear My Shape)

Dear My Shape is to shape libraries what Dear My Seer is to conf-files: the Dear ImGui successor of shapeSurvey. It opens a .shp library, draws its shapes, and lets them be inspected one by one.

shape shapes.txt

The argument is optional and defaults to shapes.txt.

It is built by the same CMake option as seer, ROCKABLE_COMPILE_SEER, which is off by default. The two applications share the vendored Dear ImGui and ImPlot sources, compiled once into a static library.

Note

shapeSurvey is still built and still works; it is described in Application shapeSurvey. shape is the newer take on the same job, built on SDL2 and Dear ImGui instead of freeglut and X11.

Warning

Both Dear My Seer and Dear My Shape are under active development and their feature sets are not frozen. In particular, Dear My Seer does not draw the deformation of the soft particles yet: use see for them.

shape already fits the bounding box, toggles preCompDone and computes the mass properties of the displayed shape, but it has no save: nothing it computes can be written back to the library. Until that lands, use shapeSurvey for the pre-computation you intend to keep, and shape to look at a library.