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# Concept

This program uses the openGL library for visualization and the glut library [2] for window management and event handling. This results in very high speed if a hardware-accellerated openGL-library is available and still high speed for software-rendering (MesaGL,[1]).

The cgx has pre- and post-processor capabilities. It is able to generate and display beam, shell and brick elements in its linear and quadratic form. In addition it can display but not create penta- and tetraeder-elements.

The mesher can not create unstructured meshes, but only a mapped mesh based on a description of the geometry. For example lines for beam elements, surfaces for shell elements and volumes (bodies) for brick elements. Lines are made from points, surfaces are made from lines and bodies are made of surfaces. Surfaces might have 3 to 5 edges and bodies might have 5 to 7 surfaces. As a result of the concept, if you modify the position of a point, all related geomety will follow. In other words, if the location of geometric entities should be changed, it is necessary to move the points on which the entities rely.

In addition entities called "set" are available to group together whatever entities. Sets are useful to handle parts of the model. For example to manipulate or display this parts. After the mesh is created it must be written to a file to be available for the solver. Additional commands for the solver as the type of analysis, material description and loading must be added with the help of an editor to create the solver input file. Several boundary conditions can also be written to files to be included in the solver input file. After the analysis is completed the results can be visualized by calling the cgx program again in an independent session. The post-processor functionality is mainly controlled by a pop-up menu were the pre-processor functionality is controlled by the keyboard. Shaded animations of static and dynamic results, the common color plots and time history plots can be created.

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