About ObjectiveFrame

The application was orginially developed at Structural Mechanics by Jonas Lindemann for his PhD thesis work. See:

• Objective Frame - An educational tool for understanding the behavior of structures
• Designing a new user interface for ObjectiveFrame
• Techniques for distributed access and visualisation computational mechanics

ObjectiveFrame has also been used to develop distributed techniques for finite element applications using the CORBA framework.

• CORBA in distributed Finite element applications

The application has also been used as an experimental application for user interface techniques within the field of finite element analysis. Daniel Åkesson implemented 3d gesture controls using a leap-controller for interacting with finite element models.

• Using 3D gesture controls for interacting with mechanical models

Pierre Olsson developed routines and user interfaces for computing section properties.

Implementation details.

The application is implemented as a C++ application using OpenGL for hardware accelerated rendering. ObjectiveFrame uses a scene graph model implemented using the C++ library Interactive Visualisation Framework - Ivf++. The solver is implemented using the matrix-library Eigen.

This version of the application has been given a large overhaul both with regards to C++ and the user interface. To increase the interactive aspect of the application the user interface has been reimplemented using the ImGui - library. This is an immediate mode user interface library that provides a state-less user interface rendered directly in the OpenGL window. The underlying framework for rendering OpenGL windows is the GLFW library

In the newest release ObjectiveFrame can also take advantage of the TetGen mesh generator for quickly creating beam/truss-structures from points.

Future development

• User interface improvements. There is a still a lot of non-standard ways of interacting with the application, but these are also some things that will be worked out in upcoming versions.
• Interactions with the CALFEM for Python library. I would like to see the application as a pre-processor for generating CALFEM code that can be used by students in Structural Mechanics.
• More developed scripting interface for creating more interesting plugins for generating beam/truss-structures.

Jonas Lindemann