progfig is a GUI tool using PyQT for generating images that depict liquid crystalline ordering and/or phase types. It uses the mayavi visualisation engine for 3D rendering and, through clever choice of parameters, enables the user to generate nice images that represent a variety of phase types.
To load it, simply:
python main.py
Now, change settings to your hearts content! Some defaults are provided, for example, nematic with polar = True gives this:
You can also play around with "blocks", enabling modulated phase types such as the SmA_AF phase from https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07305:
Or even things that don't (yet) exist; This TGBA_F type structure:
- The input values of and the output values are not really meaningful currently, but the user supplied value of does allow control over orientation although you probably want to set it a lot higher than you might think.
- While testing/fixing, some variables pertaining to visual quality are hardcoded in visualisation.py; this will be addressed in future once the code is less flimsy
- Layer planes ignore block orientation, so this produces visually unsatisfying results.
- Drawing with cylinders is sort of slow; best to preview with a quiver, then when you are happy, you can draw cylinders and go make a cup of tea while you wait.
an earlier version of progfig.py is in this repo; this uses matplotlib as the visualiser and is surpassed by this version.