As mentioned above, one can obtain a picture of the current situation by issuing the command:

     &PICTURE, VIEW_DATA  -OPTIONS

This command is used to get pictures of everything, and as a result, it has options to control:

• The type of data used in the picture,
• The title of the picture,
• The portion of global space to paint,
• The "annotation" of the picture,
• The production of a deflected shape picture,
• The use of color in the picture, and
• The names of things included in the picture.

Once something is specified on a &PICTURE command, it is remembered through out a MOSES session, unless however, it is changed. There are Tool Bar controls for all of the things on the picture command as well as a set of keyboard shortcuts to make life easier.

The

     -RENDER R_TYPE

option defines the manner in which the picture will be rendered. If you are in the GUI user interface, you can specify a R_TYPE of GL to have the picture rendered with Open GL. Alternative, a R_TYPE of WF will render the pictures as a "wire frame". WF rendering is the only thing available with a WIN interface.

With so much going on here, it is easy to get a picture which is worthless. The option:

     -RESET

will reset the defaults so that something appears.

The option

     -MOVIE M_TYPE, F_RATE, P_MULT

will produce a movie. When this option is used, the movie will be written to the a file and then operation will return to normal. Here, M_TYPE is the format of the movie and it must be either: AVI or MPG. F_RATE, is the frame rate, and P_MULT is the "play multiple". This will result in a movie with frames between EVE_BEGIN and ESTOP (defined with the -EVENTS option discussed below) at

     P_MULT / F_RATE

second intervals. Notice that if P_MULT is .5, then the movie will be played at one half of the default speed. The defaults are to use a frame rate of 5, to play the entire process, and to use a play multiple of 1. If this is not smooth enough, you may want to increase the frame rate, but this will increase the time required to generate the movie. Finally, if you use M_TYPE of AVI, then Windows Media Player will not play it unless you have DviX codecs installed.

There is quite a bit of data which can be defined to create a picture which is precisely what one wants. To make it easier to reproduce these pictures, MOSES employs the concept of a "user defined view". One defines a view with the command:

     &PI_VIEW -OPTION, V_NAME, ......

Here, V_NAME is the name which will be given to the view, and the data which follows is any data which can be placed on the &PICTURE command. The -OPTION may be either -ADD or -DELETE. For -DELETE, only V_NAME is required. Now, once a view has been defined, a picture can be produced with

     &PICTURE, V_NAME, ....

Here, V_NAME is the name of a view defined via &PI_VIEW, and what follows can be nothing or any valid &PICTURE data. If additional data is specified, it modifies the picture defined in V_NAME. To make it easy to plot all of "your" views, you can use the string function:

     &NAMES(PI_VIEW)

which returns all of the user defined views.

Finally, a picture that has been created may be written to a file for later processing by using the option

     -SAVE_PIC

The file used by this command is specified on the -SECONDARY option of the &DEVICE command. Normally, one receives a single picture in response to a &PICTURE command. If, however, this command is issued from either the Static Process Menu or the Process Post-Processing Menu, an animation of the process will be plotted. For an animation, the number of frames can be controlled with the option:

     -EVENTS,  EVE_BEGIN, EVE_END, EVE_INC

Here, EVE_BEGIN is the first event for which a picture will be drawn, ESTOP is the last event for which a picture will be drawn, and EVE_INC is the increment at which pictures will be drawn between EVE_BEGIN and ESTOP. One can specify multiple sets of these three values, and pictures will be drawn according to each set. By default, all events in the process will be plotted. If this "goes by too fast", use this option with

     -EVENTS 0 9000 .1

which plots frames at .1 increments. If this is still too fast, change .1 to something smaller. Of course, increasing the increment will speed up the picture.