OpenMC uses surface primitives to create geometry, and because surfaces can be described via vectors, I think it would be cool to have an option to create vector images when plotting geometry. This would make creating full resolution images of extremely complicated geometries simple as all the information one needs is in one file. The SVG file would also likely be much smaller file in size than a PNG with millions of pixels (but I’m not an expert at all so I could be wrong).
I myself have very little experience in this area, but I have been thinking about it for a while and I think it would be a cool project for someone to work on!
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Cool idea @oyardas2. I think the biggest challenge would be that you’d have to solve all the equations of a plane intersecting with the various surfaces in the model. I think this is essentially the approach used in the MCNP plotter and it’s, uh, not very simple. Comparatively, our approach in OpenMC is really simple – just pick a bunch of pixels and figure out what cells correspond to each.
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Wow! What a cool paper! So it looks like would involve a significant amount of linear algebra and code infrastructure to do this… Luckily the MCNP folks seem to have much of the theory figured out, someone just needs to implement it (easier said than done).
thanks for the awesome information.