The Monitor Component

A Sofa Component named Monitor (sofa::component::misc::Monitor) can help you to visualize, to monitor or to export some properties.

Quick overview of Monitor possibilities

With this component, you can see the positions, trajectories, velocities, forces of chosen particles directly in the GUI or save it into files (readable with Gnuplot for example). You can get an idea of what this component can make launching the Sofa/examples/Components/misc/Monitor.scn scene.

Using the Monitor Component

To monitor properties you have to add a Monitor Component in your scene. Here is a selection of a piece of code of one of the Monitor of the example scene:

<Monitor template="Vec3d" name="velocities_8-16-24" listening="1" indices="8 16 24" showPositions="0" PositionsColor="1 1 0 1" showVelocities="1" VelocitiesColor="1 1 0 1" ForcesColor="1 1 0 1" showMinThreshold="0.01" TrajectoriesPrecision="0.1" TrajectoriesColor="1 1 0 1" sizeFactor="1" />

You can of course also add the component to your scene with the Modeler, look for Monitor in the search form. Required : for the Monitor to work you have to specify listening=“1” or to set listening to true in the GUI. You have to select the properties you want to monitor or display.

• If you want to visualize positions, you have to select showPositions (either clicking the corresponding field in the Visualization tab in the component GUI or adding showPositions="1" in your scene description file).
• Then you can choose the color to be applied to your position visualization with PositionsColor and if needed the size of the visualization with sizeFactor.
• You have to select the dofs that you want to monitor using the classic indices field : indices="8 16 24".
• You can choose to export the positions of your dofs with ExportPositions. The positions will be exported to a file named following this rule : your_monitor_component_name+_x.txt in your Sofa directory.

Visualize the result

To read the resulting file, you can use Gnuplot. In Gnuplot, you can for instance run the following command to render curves of your export file:

splot "monitor-displacement-faceNode_x.txt"

See more Gnuplot examples here.

The ExtraMonitor Component, a Monitor extension

The ExtraMonitor component gives you the ability to use everything that it is in Monitor with some Extra stuff. It has been written to allow to compute, for example, the resultant of the forces of all the dofs of a MechanicalObject, or the minimum displacement of a region…

Using ExtraMonitor

Include the ExtraMonitor in your scene. Here is an example of use :

<ExtraMonitor template="Vec3d" name="velocities_8-16-24" listening="1" indices="8 16 24" showPositions="0" PositionsColor="1 1 0 1" showVelocities="1" VelocitiesColor="1 1 0 1" ForcesColor="1 1 0 1" showMinThreshold="0.01" TrajectoriesPrecision="0.1" TrajectoriesColor="1 1 0 1" sizeFactor="1" ExportWcin="false" ExportWext="false" resultantF="true" />

• With this xml code, we say we want to use an ExtraMonitor named ‘Socle’ with every indices read in the indices field of the Engine named ‘engineToto’. (We suppose ‘engineToto’ has been defined before).
• Then we say we would like to export forces in a file but we set resultantF to true to precise we want to export the resultant of the dofs forces and not the forces of each of the dofs given in the indices set.
• We also export positions but again we don’t want every positions to be written down in the selected flag. We choose to export the minimum displacement and the maximum displacement of our set of particles. minCoord contains the number of the coordinate (0 stands for x, 1 stands for y, 2 stands for z in a 3D) for which we want to get the displacement. The same for maxCoord. Defaults values are -1 which means we don’t want to export the corresponding displacement.

Additions

ExtraMonitor does not add visualization possibilities but it adds export possibilities.