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If at any point you wish to save your slices, splines or surfaces, select the Save button from the top of the Slicing panel (see Figure 299). A file selection window will appear with the Save Options window alongside (see Figure 300).

In previous versions of CySlice, the saving of slices and networks was combined into the one interface. These two different functions have now been separated; see the Networks: Save and Load chapter for further details on the new network save and load.

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Figure 299. Loading and Saving

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Figure 300. Save Options

If you use the default option settings, then every slicing object (i.e. slice, spline or surface) on every layer, whether its picked or not, will be saved into a SLICE file.

Change the options to save a subset;



Loading

To load objects that you have previously saved, or to import data from another package, select the Load button from the main CySlice window (see Figure 299). A file selection window will appear with the Load Options window alongside (see Figure 301).

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Figure 301. Load Options

If you use the default option settings, then every slicing object (i.e. slice, spline or surface) in the SLICE files will be loaded, and picked, and placed on their saved layers.

Change the options to load a subset, or to change where objects re-loaded;



Transferring - SGI IRIX

The Transfer button is used to move slices from CySlice directly into a modeler (see Figure 302). The idea here is that you have CySlice and your modeler running at the same time. You create slices or patches, and transfer them over as and when you need them.

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Figure 302. Transferring Slices

When the Transfer button is selected, all slices and interpolated lines in the Out layer, and all visible networks patches, are written to the transfer files. By default, the base name of these files is /usr/tmp/cyslice. If you want to change the default, define the HEADUS_CYSLICE_TRANSFER environment variable. You will need to add something like the following to your .cshrc file. Make sure you can write files to the directory that you select. 

  
  setenv HEADUS_CYSLICE_TRANSFER /somewhere/cyslice

Two files are created. The geometry is written into an IGES file called cyslice.transfer. A second file, called cyslice.ready, is created once the geometry has been fully written. A user-defined button or plugin would then be used to load the slices into your modeler with minimum effort.

The load procedure should check that cyslice.ready exists before loading cyslice.transfer. The reason for this is that the geometry might be large and take some time to write; you don't want to load it until it is fully written. Once the geometry is loaded, cyslice.ready should be deleted. See the chapter titled Plugin: PowerAnimator for details on an implementation of one of these automatic loading plugins.

After the slices have been written to the transfer files, they are deleted from the Out layer. If everything has worked, they will have been transferred over to your modeler.

By default the Transfer button isn't visible. You enable it by adding -t to the cyslice command line.

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