The compilation of SOFA produces a binary file runSofa, which can be found in the folder %{SOFA_BUILD_DIR}/bin. The execution of the binary – either via the terminal or by double clicking the instance – launchs a default XML scene with the name caduceus.

Launch SOFA

The binary runSofa can be launched with different options, that can be enabled through the command line. You can display the different options available by using the argument ‘-h’ in the command line: runSofa -h We obtain the following output:

This is a SOFA application. Here are the command line arguments (short name, long name, description, default value)
    -h, --help: this help 
    -a, --start: start the animation loop  (default: false ) 
    -c, --computationTimeSampling: Frequency of display of the computation time statistics, in number of animation steps. 0 means never.  (default: 0 ) 
    -g, --gui: choose the UI (batch|glut|glut-mt|qglviewer|qt)  (default:  ) 
    -l, --load: load given plugins  (default: ) 
    -n, --nb_iterations: (only batch) Number of iterations of the simulation  (default: 1000 ) 
    -p, --factory: print factory logs  (default: false ) 
    -r, --recent: load most recently opened file  (default: false ) 
    -s, --simu: select the type of simulation (bgl, dag, tree, smp)  (default: tree ) 
    -t, --temporary: the loaded scene won't appear in history of opened files  (default: false ) 
    -v, --verification: load verification data for the scene  (default:  ) others: file names`

When getting started with runSofa, the following options might be valuable for you:

-a: runSofa starts the animation directly (no need to press on the animate button)

-c: Displays interesting statistics about the computation time of the simulation. It is very useful to analyse the performance of your simulation, or to benchmark a plugin developed for SOFA. The value that follows the argument determines the number of simulation steps to wait for before dumping the statistics (-c 10 will display the logs every 10 simulation steps)

-g allows you to choose between the existing user interfaces developed in SOFA: -qglviewer: default interface -batch: command line interface (only displays statistics)

-l allows you to load a SOFA plugin by specifying its name

-n specifies the number of simulation steps to run before closing runSofa. Can only be used with “–g batch”

Load and run a specific scene

The default scene loaded by runSofa is named “caduceus.scn”. This scene file can be found in %{SOFA_SOURCE_DIR}/examples/Demos, along with other demo scenes. Let us see now how to load one of these scenes:

• From the runSofa interface, you can select a scene file through the “File->Open” Menu (Ctrl+O), and run it by simply pressing the “animate” button.
• If you are launching runSofa from the command line, you can also specify the scene file to load as an argument.

 

SOFA GUI

To start the simulation, press “Animate” – the simulation speed in frames per second (fps) and the advancement of the simulation time in seconds (s) will show up in the left bottom corner. If there is a need for a simulation with a lower or higher detail of the time, then adapt the parameter “DT”. A stepwise advancing of the simulation with the stepsize DT can be achieved by clicking on “Step”. In order to restart the scene use “Reset Scene”. The camera of the visualization on the right hand side of the executable is controlled by the mouse movement and the:

• left mouse button to change the rotation of the camera
• right mouse button to translate the camera
• middle mouse button to zoom in and out.

The camera position and orientation can be saved and recovered using the “Save View” and “Reset View” buttons respectively. A running simulation can be manipulated with the mouse movement, when clicking on the left mouse button and on shift. Further uses of the keyboard can be found in the tab “Viewer”:

• B: TO CHANGE THE BACKGROUND
• C: TO SWITCH INTERACTION MODE: press the KEY C. Allow or not the navigation with the mouse.
• O: TO EXPORT TO .OBJ The generated files scene-time.obj and scene-time.mtl are saved in the running project directory
• P: TO SAVE A SEQUENCE OF OBJ Each time the frame is updated an obj is exported
• R: TO DRAW THE SCENE AXIS
• S: TO SAVE A SCREENSHOT The captured images are saved in the running project directory under the name format capturexxxx.bmp
• T: TO CHANGE BETWEEN A PERSPECTIVE OR AN ORTHOGRAPHIC CAMERA
• (Shift+) V: TO SAVE A VIDEO Each time the frame is updated a screenshot is saved. The screenshots are saved in the folder %{SOFA_DIR}/share/screenshots. If the folder does not exist, it needs to be created.
• Esc: TO QUIT ::sofa::