runSOFA

The default compilation of SOFA produces a binary file called 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 executable – launches a default XML scene with the name caduceus.scn, using the Qt library.

Launch runSOFA

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 using Qt and with a 3D view using QGLViewer – qt: same but with an alternative viewer based on Qt only – 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.

If using the shipped binaries of SOFA (or the default CMake options when compiling), the default GUI will be based on Qt/QGLViewer (same as using –g qglviewer).

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.