By Jim Carson
Product Manager | Tecplot, Inc.
In my last blog entry, I mentioned some of time-saving keyboard and menu shortcuts in Tecplot 360 and Focus. Today, I wanted to write about some of the default behaviors that occur when your Tecplot software starts up.
One of our Prime Directives is to ensure backward compatibility with layouts from Tecplot version 7.5 (released in late 1998) on. In other words, plots in older versions will look the same in the newer versions. At the same time, we try hard to reduce the amount of work needed to produce those plots. We’ve done numerous on-site visits and had discussions with you at many of the events we’ve attended, and have come up with several ideas about to make it easier. As a visual example, consider the first plot view in different versions of the Tecplot software with two very common data sets.
The Onera Wing is featured in our Getting Started tutorial as an example of an external flow case compared to measured wind tunnel data:
 Tecplot 10R6 |
 Tecplot 360 2006 |
 Tecplot 360 2010 |
The defaults are set up so you’ll immediately see the wing in the middle of the vast flow domain.
The (soap) crutcher is the used as our internal flow tutorial:
 Tecplot 10R6 |
 Tecplot 360 2006 |
 Tecplot 360 2010 |
For the most part, I think we’ve done a good job here. However, I occasionally hear from long-time users who would like the old behavior. So, today’s blog is to discuss the three most common requests.
- On 3D plots, you want the axis displayed. We changed this default in the first release of Tecplot 360 (2006) because we observed a lot of users were loading 3D data then turning off each axis. You can still turn them back on via the user interface, but if you’d prefer them on by default, you can edit your tecplot.cfg file, uncommenting the red octomorphs:
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The first three lines are self-explanatory. The last two lines adjust the initial plot to accommodate the extra space needed by the axes. In Figure 1, Tecplot is zoomed in, showing the maximum amount of the cube. The axes are drawn around this, and get clipped. Uncommenting these two lines produces the plot in Figure 2, where Tecplot zooms out slightly to accommodate the axis.
 Figure 1: Maximum surface shown. Note the axis is clipped. |
 Figure 2: Axis is fully visible, but the surface is smaller. |
- You want zone, outlines and meshes to cycle through colors. In Tecplot 360 2008R2, we made numerous changes to the default styles set up when you first load a dataset. One of the additional changes that our beta users requested was to turn off the color cycling (Figure 3).
Several months after the release, a few customers approached me at the ASM meeting in Orlando asking how to bring this setting back (Figure 4). Simple, just uncomment these lines in your tecplot.cfg file:
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The first setting cycles colors: red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, violet. The second setting restores the line thickness to its older levels. (We had made them black and thinner since they were used more for context than information.)
 Figure 3: Color cycling is off. Meshes and edges are black. |
 Figure 4: Color cycling is on. Meshes and edges will cycle through red-yellow-green-cyan-blue-violet. The lines are also 4x thicker. |
- You want all surface zones on by default. One of the changes we introduced was to iterate through the data looking at the types of zones present. If there are boundaries, and their type is wall, then we’ll show them. Otherwise, they’ll be off.
This is a setting that we got mostly right. After field testing, I think we should have also enabled inlet and outlet zones. This will done when we add improved streamtrace seeding. In the meantime, you can change this behavior by uncommenting the line in the tecplot.cfg file:
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Be aware that for external flow cases, this will change the behavior in two ways. First, you’ll now see the outflow, symmetry and farfield surfaces. Second, the default zoom will be to the entire flow domain (Figure 5). With the current default, you have a much more usable view on the wing (Figure 6).
 Figure 5: Farfield, Symmetry and Outflow surfaces shown. |
 Figure 6: Only walls are shown. This lets us zoom into the wing. |
The tecplot.cfg file is commented, so feel free to explore, and please let us know if there’s a default that’s bugging you. Also, for those who’ve read this far, I offer an obligatory plug: I’m would very much like to visit customer sites in the 4Q2010 to learn what you’re doing, how you’re using Tecplot 360 or Tecplot Focus, and in what areas we should focus our development.