VEES and Other PostProcessing for QuadElements

mebowers · Post by **mebowers** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 9:58 am

I'm finding the VEES program distributed by the OpenSees website to be quite handy for looking at displacements and general model geometry.

The only problem is the domain of the program is easily exceeded for large models or those not centered around within maybe 150 units or so from the origin. Any points placed outside this range and you have to zoom way out to look at the model. When you do find your model it is offcentered and very hard to view. Sometimes the model just doesn't display at all in the event of large elements. Anybody know an easy way get around this very annoying problem (besides converting units)?

Can anyone recommend another post-processing visualization program to view quad element displacments or even just general model geometry? OSP does not seem to handle quad elements very well and VEES requires a small model and causes OpenSees to terminate when the VEES window is closed.

Thanks!

aneeman · Post by **aneeman** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 9:11 pm

Hello mebowers,

I recently posted a new executable (4/30/2007, version 0.0.1g) to deal with larger models.

If you are using this version and still having problems, is is possible you could send me your source (at least for the model building) - that would help me debug the code.

cheers,

alisa

aneeman[at]cse[dot]ucsc[dot]edu

mebowers · Post by **mebowers** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 10:06 am

Super! I haven't messed around with it a whole lot, but at first glance, I love the changes you guys have made to the new version. Thanks for letting me know about the new version. This will save me a bunch of time. Keep up the good work!

Matt Bowers

mebowers · Post by **mebowers** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 11:25 am

Alisa,

Couple of quick questions for you..

What kind of file is loaded by the load step window? Any type of file I try to load gives me an error message.

I read in the release notes that the new version of OpenSees has a new recorder to work with vees. Does this have anything to do with the load step window?

Thanks for your help,
Matt Bowers

aneeman · Post by **aneeman** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 8:31 pm

I made a new recorder that leverages stuff Frank had already made and code written by Guanzhou Jie, Boris Jeremic's student (now graduated).

It saves the model (or at least everything that has a sendSelf/recvSelf method) to a binary file. The tcl command, using the vees OpenSees exe is:

recorder domain

and it makes files domain1, domain2,.. like a normal recorder.

then the binary file it made can be read back in by vees using the gui. You will definately get deformation. For stress and strain it depends if they are saved in sendSelf, and I've only implemented visualizing stress for the soil bricks.

Be careful, for the Template3Dep materials the files can be quite large because of all the tensors.

I hadn't seen the new release notes - could you post a link to it?

thanks for the positive feedback,

alisa

mebowers wrote:Alisa,

Couple of quick questions for you..

What kind of file is loaded by the load step window? Any type of file I try to load gives me an error message.

I read in the release notes that the new version of OpenSees has a new recorder to work with vees. Does this have anything to do with the load step window?

Thanks for your help,
Matt Bowers

mebowers · Post by **mebowers** » Mon Jul 16, 2007 12:18 pm

Don't know if these are official "release notes" but they tipped me off to the changes in all the different versions of the vees program.

http://neesforge.nees.org/frs/shownotes ... ease_id=53

Your help has been much appreciated!
Matt Bowers