Localisation, shear, faults and visualisation

I am a firm believer in calculating as much as I possibly can (and displaying it) as I am running my 2D (and to an extent 3D) discrete element codes. This allows so much more “computational steering” than the traditional post-processing approach. Obviously, for simple attributes such as displacement magnitude and components this was pretty trivial. However, for stress and strain it required quite a bit of blood, sweat and tears to get it firstly correct and secondly fast (enough) when doing it “on the fly” along with normal force, velocity calculations etc. But the result is rather pleasing. I take a bit of a 2-pronged approach - display as you go along using my code’s built in graphics and for slicker movies/animations/visualisations use something that is designed to do just that. I almost exclusively (these days) run my codes on Windows 10/11 for many different reasons. However, I really couldn’t find an easy-to-use piece of visualisation software on Windows - yes I know about ParaView and pyvista but they didn’t feel right to me (a very personal thing I know). Anyway as a result I “finish off” my more polished results/animations using ImageTank on the Mac, it is a wonderful, elegant piece of software. Look it up! Here is a movie of localisation in part of an evolving frictional-cohesive thrust wedge (original thickness 2.5km), showing some of the detail, that with a bit of work in your code, you can display to the full. Here I am just showing the total Max. Shear strain as it accrues in this part of the 2D model.