Thanks for the VI. My only concern is the time it takes to plot a 204 element mesh. Imagine doing this for about 8000 elements. That will add 8000x4=32000 points into the 3D graph if we follow this method of creating a plot for each element (I am attaching a image for a automobile bumper model I created in 3D graph using parametric surface instead of 3D curve for each element). On my IBM thinkpad T43 it took about 3 minutes to finish plotting about 8000 elements into 8000 different plots. There must be an easier and faster way to do this.
I was also looking at the Plot3Dmesh function of 3Dgraph. It picks up all the points on a surface and calculates a triangular mesh over those points and plots the elements and nodes in one plot. Since there is only one plot the speed is a non-issue. The only problem I have with 3Dmesh function is that it requires a certain order to the points we input to ceate a nice looking mesh. I could not find any documentation on that "order".
The best way would be to find a solution in which all the elements and nodes are plotted in a single plot. This will reduce the number of points needed to show a mesh all the while reducing overhead of creating numerous plot to show a FEM mesh.
Another thing that caught my interest was DiaDEM. NI claims that diadem can show FEM meshes. It would be nice to know if DiaDEM lends its 3D control to LabVIEW (Not the whole program in activex container) and we can programmatically feed data to that 3D control.
There is no way to call the 3D control within DiaDEM from LabVIEW. The only way to utilize the DiaDEM display of the FEM mesh is to open DiaDEM using LabVIEW with ActiveX.
