Working With Several Geometries

 

Surface adds further geometries for the domain, for the gauss map (the stereographic projection of the normal map onto the plane) and for a conjugate geometry to the geometry provided by Time_Object. The task button selects one of them as the current geometry, the pointer to it is stored in the model instance variable and is used by most of the Surface methods.

Changing the task also changes the geometry which is displayed since the current time section "display" shows is created from the model. To be able to view the geometries independent from the current model there is a special display method for each of them. Pressing the button pops up a layer which allows to select one of the display methods.

  
Figure 8.15: Display Layer for Project Surface

If the geometry and conjugate data set have the same structure (i.e. if the Chains have the same lengths and the Geom2d instances have the same discretizations) the special display method can be used to interpolate the current time sections of these data sets. The interpolation can be controlled by a ruler "associate-disp" adds to the option menu (see 7.4.3.4), together with the time ruler this allows to view a two-parameter family of surfaces.