The Options menu is as follows:-
| Movie Control | Displays the movie control window |
| Difference of surfaces | Calculates the shortest distance of each point on one object surface from a second object surface. Two objects must be loaded. |
| Auto Show Diff | If checked, the image in the difference window is updated whenever the main window image changes. This is likely to be rather slow due to the computational complexity of the process. |
| ZDifference of surfaces | Calculates the distance between surfaces perpendicular to the plane of the screen. This is quicker than the above option but, for surfaces at an angle to the plane of the screen, it can give misleading distance results. It can, however, be used to estimate volume differences between surfaces (with certain restrictions) . |
| Auto Show Zdiff | If checked, the image in the difference window is updated whenever the main window image changes. The faster option above is automatically selected in this mode. clicking on difference of surfaces above will cause a one-off calculation of the more accurate difference map. |
| Register by Landmark | Applies a landmark based registration algorithm to register the current object to the aux object (only the current object position is altered). Corresponding landmarks MUST already have been placed on both surfaces. If there are more markers on one object than on the other, the extra markers are ignored. The markers to be used must be in the same order on both surfaces (A matches A, B matches B etc.) |
| Register by ICP | Applies an iterative closest point algorithm for registering the current object to the aux object (only the current object position is altered). This attempts to find an optimal fit between the two surfaces. When the two objects are known to differ over part of the surface, only the surface which is believed to match should be used. Part of the surface of the current object can be selected, for registration, using the edit/select mode. Any part of the current object which is left in the normal rendering colour will be used for registration; regions in the alternate colour will not be used. If no editing is done, the algorithm will attempt to register the entire surface. More details on registration |
| Surface Area | This reports the area of the surface. NOTE: The input data must be in units of mm. for the areas reported to be meaningful - there is no way to enforce this with any of the 3d surface data formats used. If the Edit/Select options have been used to hide, remove or tag part of the surface the areas of these different categories of surface are shown. This operates by calculating the area of each triangle on the surface and adding it to the appropriate category. |
| Object Volume | If the surface defines a closed volume, this will report the volume. If the surface is not closed, there is no volume to report. NOTE: The data must be in units of mm. for the volume reported to be meaningful - there is no way to enforce this with any of the 3d surface data formats used. |
| Part Volume | This calculates the volume of the object to the right of the vertical midline of the screen (positive x space in screen measurement mode). The measurement menu can be used to place markers, align them in a vertical plane and move this plane to the centre of the screen. |
| Slice info | When show slice is active, this calculates the area contained by the slice and the centroid of the slice. The user is offered the choice of adding a marker at the slice centroid. A set of xy co-ordinates representing the slice can be saved to the windows clipboard. |
| Condense STL | The STL format separately stores the vertex co-ordinates for every triangle so that multiple copies of each vertex will occur in the file. The OBJ file format stores a list of vertices followed by a separate triangulation pattern. This second format is more efficient. This option searches through the data for duplicated vertices and removes the duplicates (it is not guaranteed to remove ALL duplicates). The process is quite slow but is appropriate when saving STL files in OBJ file format. Image rendering will also be faster after this process.Saving any data set in STL format reverses this process in the saved file. |
| Flip Triangles | Only one side of the data surface is shaded, the back is black. This reverses the winding on all the polygons in the data set so that the other side of the surface is shaded. |
| Change Initscale | Allows the absolute dimensions of the data set to be re-scaled.The co-ordinates are multiplied by the number entered (0.5 halves the linear dimensions of the object). This will affect all measurements and any saved data. |
| XFlip | Mirrors the data set in the current X-axis by flipping through the YZ plane at the centre of the window. |
| Put To Centre | Moves the viewing window to put the data set in the centre of the window. |
| Fit to Window | Moves the viewing window to put the data set in the centre of the window and zooms the display to nearly fill the window with the data. |
| Concatenate Tri | Combines data sets in current & aux objects to create a combined set in a new object in the next available object space. It is preferable to concatenate objects of the same format. |
| Shell Surface | This thickens a surface scan into a solid object that can be built on a rapid prototyper (usually by exporting an STL format file). The surface can be grown inwards (preserving the outer surface as the original) or outwards (preserving the original surface on the inside of the shell). The smooth growing option may work better on tightly curved or noisy surfaces but is much slower. |
| Intersect Surfaces | This is an orientation dependent function that creates the difference between the depth maps as a new, closed, object. The part of the aux object which is in front of the current obj is copied into the new object The new object is placed in the frame of reference of the current object. The new object is created at the pixel resolution of the image in the window. A more accurate result will be obtained if the region of interest fills more of the window. |
| Draw | Re draw the Current object in the main window |
| Update Aux | Ensure the image of the Aux object is valid for Image Difference calculation |
| Timing | if tagged, shows rendering time |