Become one with your modeling tool

I’m happy to be able to break the news that we’ve released a new update to GeoStudio 2007: version 7.1.  We released version 7.03 back in September, but have not been idle in the seven months since.

Version 7.1, in a way, is what we really wanted version 7 to be.  Many features we had originally slated to release with 7.00 had to be cut because of time constraints, but are now finally done.

There are also several important new features in 7.1 that we never dreamed of originally, but that came about because of feedback from you and other customers who tried 7.00 and told us “it’s nice, but it doesn’t do …”.

As usual, 7.1 is a free upgrade if you already have a version 7 license.  Prices for new licenses and upgrades from version 6 are on our web site.

New Features in 7.1

I’m going to take the next few weeks to walk through some of the new features.  You can read the full list of changes in the Release History, but I warn you, it’s long!  (And rather dry reading.)

Here’s a list of the more interesting changes.  I’m not sure yet which ones I’ll talk about–if any catches your eye, let me know and I’ll make sure to go into it in more detail.

• A new Spatial Mohr Coulomb material model in SLOPE/W lets you vary material properties as a function of x and y.  The FE products similarly include spatial functions for applying initial conditions (vary initial temperature across a material, for example).
• Ponded water weight is calculated automatically, and we’ve got much better visual feedback to show you how the weight is being applied.
• SLOPE/W can do transient stability analyses.  Gives you a factor of safety for each time step, graph FOS vs time, etc.
• You can use Draw Contours even in Define now, to visualize the data Solve is going to use as input.
• Install a new Resource CD and do a keyword search through all the resources to quickly find an example that will demonstrate a concept you need to learn.
• You get thumbnails of your gsz files!
• Generate a report from any product.  (In 7.0 this feature was only in SLOPE/W.)
• Save a list of contours, much like you can save a list of graphs.
• Display Sketch Text in only one analysis.

That should be enough to whet your appetite, and keep me going for a few more weeks!

Compatibility Caveat

Because of some rather important changes to the file format to allow for these new features, you may have trouble using the older 7.0x version to open files saved with 7.1.  If you have several people in your office, I’d suggest everyone upgrade to 7.1 at the same time.

Free Download

Click here to go to the Downloads page, then click “GeoStudio 2007 v7.10, Installer“.  As always you can try it out for free using the included Viewer or Basic license. 

If you already have an older version of GeoStudio 2007 installed (e.g., 7.03), uninstall that one first, then install this.  (Don’t worry, you won’t lose any existing settings.)

If you’re starting a new project and you already have a picture of the geometry, you can get started quickly by using that picture as a reference for drawing your geometry. 

The picture may be from another CAD application, or even a photograph or a hand drawing as long as it’s accurate enough for your needs.  The important things are that it represent the geometry you need to analyze, and that it be to scale.

Import the picture

• Create a new blank analysis;
• choose Sketch – Pictures from the menu or toolbar;
• click the Insert button and pick your picture file;
• your mouse cursor changes to a thumbnail – click on your drawing to place the picture.  (The spot you click will be the bottom left corner of the picture, but it doesn’t really matter where you put it yet, as our next step will be to resize and position it properly.)

(See importing pictures for more tips, including converting DXFs into regions automatically.)

Here I’ve imported the sketch of a Lagoon Berm Design I found through a Google search, from http://www.ces.purdue.edu/pork/manure/dam.htm.

Scale the picture 

Now that we have a picture on our screen, we want to scale it properly so that GeoStudio’s coordinates match those in the drawing.

To scale a picture, you need to know the actual engineering coordinates for two points on the picture–preferably two points that are far apart from each other.

In this example, I’ll pick the top-left of the berm, and the right edge of the shelf under the water, because that’s all the sketch gives me distances for.  Hopefully in your real-life problems you have a bit more data!

Still in Sketch Pictures mode, and with your picture selected in the list:

• click Scale…; a “Scale Picture” dialog box appears.
• Click on one of the reference points; this will be Point A.  For my example I’m clicking the top-left of the berm.  (Zoom in if you have to, to improve accuracy.)
• Click on the second reference point; this will be Point B.  For me that’s the edge of the shelf.
• In the Scale Picture dialog box, type in the real coordinates for the two points you’ve defined.  I’m giving Point A the coordinates (20,20) and Point B (35,17).

Click Apply, and your picture is now scaled to match your file.  Double-check it by moving your cursor to other points on the picture and make sure the coordinates are correct.

Draw the Geometry

Once the picture is properly scaled, drawing the geometry is easy.  Use the Draw Regions command to draw regions overtop of the scaled picture.

Caveat for version 7.03

Unfortunately, a bug in GeoStudio 2007 version 7.03 (and likely earlier versions as well, I haven’t actually tried them) broke picture scaling.  To use this feature you’ll need version 7.1 or higher (which has not yet been released as of this writing but I hope it will be soon), or version 6 (GeoStudio 2004) or earlier.

With 7.03 you’ll have to instead scale the picture by hand:  use the Modify Objects command, select the picture, then drag the corners to resize it until your reference points end up at the right coordinate.

Beginning with GeoStudio 2007, you no longer apply boundary conditions to nodes and element edges as you used to. Now you can only put boundary conditions on points and lines.

At first that doesn’t seem very different, but you quickly run into a problem when you want to add a pressure boundary only partway up a slope:

The trick is to split the line in two. You can do that using the Draw Points command, and adding a point where you want to split the line. It then becomes two lines, and you can apply the boundary condition to only the one you want.

Lori (one of our support engineers) asked if I could write something about how a v7 user can save a file such that someone in another office using v6 can still open it.

I almost said No.

Because the fact of the matter is you can’t do that.  I can’t even think of a good workaround.  And I’d much rather write about what you can do than what you can’t, I guess it’s a pride thing.

But let me humble myself enough to tackle this tough question anyway, and then solicit your feedback.  When you’re done reading this, please leave a comment or email me and tell me if this is something that has bothered you, how you’ve dealt with it, how you would expect to use such a feature, and what other comparable software you use that does allow you to save to an older format.

Backward Compatibility

The term “backward compatible” means a new piece of software is able to open a file created by an older version.

We put a lot of effort into making our new versions backward compatible.  GeoStudio 2007 can open a file you created in GeoStudio 2004.  It can even open a file you created with version 1 of SLOPE/W, and I believe even PC-SLOPE.

Of course we can’t always open an old file “cleanly”–some old features get dropped, and it’s not always possible to upgrade a file.  For example, SLOPE/W version 5 and earlier used lines to define the geometry.  Beginning with version 6 (GeoStudio 2004) we switched to regions.  GeoStudio 2004 will open most SLOPE/W v5 files and convert those lines into regions, but some files with complicated (or typically incorrect) lines won’t convert properly.  In those cases we import what we can and display a warning, and it’s up to you to fix up whatever the software wasn’t able to do.

Forward Compatibility

To be “forward compatible” means an old piece of software can open a file created by a newer version.

That generally takes prescience.

Interestingly our software was forward-compatible up until version 5, for the most part.  If SEEP/W v4 opened a SEEP/W v5 file it would do so without complaining, just ignoring any extra v5 features.  But this was “accidental”, not by design, and it could be dangerous because some data may not make sense or not be correct now that other data is missing.

Beginning with version 6 our file format has changed drastically, so older versions are simply unable to open newer files. 

This is similar to Microsoft Word:  Word 2007 creates files with the .docx extension, which cannot be opened by older versions of Word.

Saving in Older Formats

Word gets around the lack of forward compatibility in their new docx file format by allowing you to save your Word document using the old .doc format.  You may lose some of the new fancy features of Word 2007, but at least your colleague with Word 2000 can still open your files.

So why can’t we do that?  Why can’t GeoStudio 2007 have a “Save in GeoStudio 2004 format” option?

There are some technical reasons.  Some v7 features just don’t translate back to v6.  For example, a v7 file can include any number of analyses, whereas v6 can only have one of each kind.

There are some practical reasons.  A file you save in an old format and then open with the new version would be cumbersome.  For example, in v7 you create lists of boundary condition objects which you then apply to regions, points and lines.  Save that as v6 and the list of BCs disappears, and you’re just left with BCs on individual nodes.  Try opening that in v7 again and we salvage the BCs as best we can into a list, but we’ve lost the information about what regions, points or lines they were on so you have to re-apply them.

Saving in old file formats is one of those features that introduces more questions than answers when it’s discussed around our halls.  It’s technically feasible but it would involve a lot of effort and we’re not convinced people would actually be happy with what they’d get out of it.

Viewer License

The best workaround I can think of is to use the Viewer License.  Say you’re working in v7 and you need to send your file to a supervisor who only has v6.  Your supervisor can install v7 (a free download) and use the (included) free Viewer License to open your file and look at it.  He just won’t be able to save it.

Your Opinion

I’ve said before that we do listen to your opinion.  This is one of those areas where if there was enough demand for it, we would take the time to do it.

Do you run more than one version of our software in your organization?  Do you exchange files with other offices?  Have you been affected by file format changes?

Let me know!

If you use GeoStudio, you use functions.  And yet I find over and over as I watch people at workshops that to many of you functions are a bit of a mystery, a necessary evil.

Not being an engineer, I can’t help make sense of how the functions are used or what values to type in.  For that you’ll have to read the product manuals or attend one of our workshops (European readers, the annual UK workshop is only a few months away).

But I can help clarify how you can create and edit functions.  And with that frustration out of the way you can focus on the numbers.

Estimating

We always recommend you start with a simple model and add complexity only as needed.  A simple way to create a function is to estimate it.  In many cases an estimated function is all you need.  Making adjustments to an estimated function and seeing how those changes affect the result can tell you how critical this function is to your particular problem.

Most functions have an “Estimate…” button.  The details as to what values you need to provide to come up with a reasonable estimate will vary depending on what type of function you’re estimating.

Here’s how a hydraulic conductivity function is estimated.

When you estimate a function, GeoStudio uses the values you provide to generate a curve, then samples the curve at a couple dozen points and adds those points to the function.

At that point it’s just a regular function you can edit like any other.

Importing from Excel

If you already have a function defined in a spreadsheet such as Excel, it’s easy to import the data points.  Make sure the data in the spreadsheet is arranged in two columns.  Select the columns and copy them to the clipboard (Ctrl-C, Ctrl-Ins, Edit-Copy in the menu, or right-click and choose Copy). 

Then go back to GeoStudio and paste them into the function’s list of data points (by right-clicking on the list and choosing Paste, or clicking on the listbox and hitting Ctrl-V or Shift-Ins).

Exporting to Excel

Exporting is just as easy.  Select all the points in the listbox and copy them to the clipboard (right-click and Copy), then paste them into Excel.

But there’s another way to export.  If you want more detail than just the data points you defined, you can click the “More” button under the graph, then “Export data (csv)”.  Give it a file name, and it will sample the function at more points, saving the coordinates to a csv file, then opening the file in Excel (or whatever application is registered to open .csv files).  If your function has lots of variability then this method will often give you a more accurate representation.

Edit Data Points

You can edit, add or remove data points graphically. 

Make sure you’re in the “Edit Data Points” mode:

Then use your mouse to drag points around on the graph. 

• Click and drag a point to move it.
• Drag a rectangle around several points to select them all.
• Hit Del to delete selected points.
• Drag a point beyond the edge of the graph and the graph will extend to include the new extents.

Click the “Add Points” button to switch to “add” mode.  Now anywhere you click on the function you’ll add a new points.

View Function

Choose “View Function” instead of “Edit Data Points” to see the function as the solver will use it. 

For many functions, “View Function” will show you the same thing as “Edit Data Points” only without being able to modify it. 

But in a few cases the function you see under View Function is different.  For example, when you define the Hydraulic Conductivity Function you enter Matric Suction vs X-Conductivity, but View Function shows you Pore-Water Pressure vs X-Conductivity.  That’s because the solver will actually be using the PWP function.

View Slope of Function

A function with a steep slope or sharp variability in its slope can sometimes cause numerical instability.  You may want to use the “View Slope of Function” if the solution can’t converge, to make sure the graph of the slope of the function is smooth.

K-Saturation

Some functions can be easily adjusted up or down by adjusting the “y-intercept” (in math lingo).  The hydraulic conductivity function, for example, has a K-Saturation value.  Change the K-Saturation and the entire function is moved up or down so as to pass through that point.

Curve Fit and Segments

Spline functions have “Curve Fit” and “Segment” sliders which you can use to adjust how the curve is fit to the points you’ve defined. 

“Curve Fit” governs how important it is for the line to go through or near the points.

“Segments” controls how straight or curved the line should be (and thus how sharp the corners).

Summing it Up

Whether you’re a technical engineer who likes typing in exact numbers or an artistic engineer who just knows what the function should look like, you should know how to get your data into and out of a typical data point function.

When it comes to making a function look pretty, read my blog from December.

Many of the dialog boxes in GeoStudio 2007 sport a button labeled “Assigned…”. 

Associations 

The “Assigned” button is our attempt at clarifying how global objects are used across analyses.

In my vocabulary, it’s showing the “associations” I’ve described previously.

For example, click “Assigned…” in KeyIn Materials to see which regions have been assigned (or “associated with”) which materials.

But more importantly, it shows you those associations for each analysis. 

This is an especially useful feature when working with multiple analyses.  In one window you can see the differences between two analyses, to make sure you are adding your lift appropriately or that you haven’t made a mistake by missing a region.

Deleting

You can’t delete something in a KeyIn dialog if it’s still in use.  For example, try assigning a material to a region in one analysis, then switch to another analysis and try deleting the material.  You’ll get an error something like

Delete failed: Material “Foundation Material” is being used in analysis “Cutoff” by Region 1

(The material may be in use in more than one analysis or more than one region–we only show you the first one we run across.)

Now rather than switching to the “Cutoff” analysis, choosing Draw Materials, clicking “Remove”, and clicking on region 1, you can just click “Assigned…”, find everywhere that “Foundation Material” is in use, and click the “Remove” button, without ever leaving the safety and comfort of your current analysis.

Summary

The Assigned button is the only glimpse you can get into other analyses without actually changing the current analysis.  Use it to gain a better understanding of how you’ve set up your analyses, and as a quick way to remove associations across all analyses.

P.S.  Sorry for not posting last week.  I’ve been busy playing catch-up after my week away.

I’ll keep this short. I’m in Québec City today, as the resident GEO-SLOPE francophone for a workshop we were invited to put on. 

The Québec branch of the CGS invited us here to put on a two-day course on SLOPE/W and SEEP/W, and although the course is in English and all the participants know English, still French is the language they use day-to-day.

I grew up in Québec so I was more than happy to oblige when they asked if we could send someone who knew French!

What I love most about helping out at workshops is watching people.  Especially new people, who haven’t used our software much, or haven’t used the current version.

I love the way their faces light up when they see something new, like the new meshing controls in v7.  It gives me confidence we’re doing something right.

I love hearing their questions.  This workshop is a bit quieter than most because people seem a bit shy to speak up in a second language, but those who do teach us something.  Their questions show us if they have the same mental model as we did when we wrote the software.

But even more I love seeing looks of frustration.  Greg is explaining how to pick locations to graph, and the guy in the back is frowning so I go over to him and it turns out he’s in Define instead of Contour so can’t even find the Draw Graph command.

Frustrations challenge me to improve the software.

We can’t fix every rough edge, because what’s easy for one person is hard for another, but seeing how people use our software outside of our own office bubble gives me a fresh perspective.

Today one course attendee was talking with Greg about his (the other guy’s) master’s thesis he’d just finished, asking if TEMP/W could do such-and-such.  Greg started off slowly, “no, it can’t quite do that, but…” and then you could see him getting excited as the pieces went together in his brain and by the end it was “we could probably make it work!”

And lo and behold, one young engineer could end up getting his pet feature incorporated in some future version of GeoStudio, or at least get help from Greg implenting an Add-In.

So feedback is important.  We do listen.  You send us an email, call us, leave a comment on this blog, and it’s real people on this end receiving those comments.  We talk about them in our boardroom and group meetings.  They shape the direction of our software.

Don’t be shy!

Continuing from last week’s “common dialog box concepts“, today’s topic is not sheep, but cloning objects in GeoStudio.

Most GeoStudio dialog boxes that contain lists of objects have an Add button that’s split into two parts.

If you click the arrow on the button, you get a menu presenting you with different options for Adding an object.

Most of the time one option in the list (typically “New”) will be in bold.  That means it’s the default option, so if you had just clicked the main part of the Add button rather than the arrow, that’s the command that would be run.

• New: The “New” command creates a new object with default (or undefined) values.  It gets a generic name (like “New Material (2)”) and its properties are undefined or set to reasonable defaults.
• Clone:  The “Clone” command makes a copy of the object that’s currently selected.  It gets the same name but appended with a unique number (like “Foundation Material (2)”) and its properties are exact copies of the original.

“Clone” is great for experimenting with variations of a property.  You can clone your soil a few times and give each a different hydraulic conductivity, for example, then clone your analysis and use a different soil in each analysis.  Solve them all and compare the results.

Cloning Analyses

KeyIn Analyses is slightly different.  I’ll try to explain the reasoning behind the differences, but stop me (or leave a comment) if you have any questions.

KeyIn Analyses was designed to be different in an attempt to avoid common mistakes, save you some clicks, and nudge you in the direction we intended multiple analyses to be used. 

We had a lot of iterations on this feature before converging on what we have today, because so many people use the software in so many different ways! 

“Clone” is the default action for the Add button here. 

Unlike most objects, you can’t just create a “New Analysis” because there are so many different kinds of analyses to make.  Cloning an analysis works just like cloning anything else–it makes an exact copy, only modifying the name slightly to make it unique.  Everything else is cloned, including all the “associations”, such as which materials are assigned to regions, which BCs are used, and so on.

If you clone an analysis and solve it, you should get exactly the same answers as the original.

Adding an analysis of the same kind is a partial clone.

That needs explanation!

Let’s say you have a Steady-State SEEP/W analysis selected, and you click Add – SEEP/W Analysis – Transient. 

Here’s what happens:

• Because both analyses are SEEP/W (the same “kind” in our lingo), we start by cloning–making an exact duplicate.  That way the new analysis has the same material associations, boundary conditions, and so on.
• We change the analysis “type” (from Steady-State to Transient).
• If the new analysis has some initial conditions that can be satisfied by the original analysis, we make the new analysis a child and set those initial conditions to come from the parent.  In our example, a transient SEEP/W analysis can get initial head/PWP conditions from another SEEP/W analysis.

You end up with this:

The reasoning behind this feature is that it follows the most common workflow:  set up the initial state using a steady-state analysis, followed by a transient analysis.

If you had a steady-state analysis and you then created another steady-state, the new one would be an exact clone, a “sibling” to the original rather than a child, because a steady-state analysis has no initial conditions to get from a parent.  This is the scenario you’d use when you want to try several similar analyses but vary some parameter.

Adding an analysis of a different kind is a “new”

If you start with a steady-state SEEP/W analysis and then add a SIGMA/W Load/Deformation analysis, the first step is different:

• We don’t clone the original because the new analysis is a different “kind” (SIGMA/W rather than SEEP/W).  Instead the new analysis is in a pristine state with no material or boundary condition associations.
• As before, the new analysis gets its type set to Load/Deformation.
• As before, if the new analysis has some initial conditions that can be satisfied by the original analysis, we make the new analysis a child and set those initial conditions to come from the parent.  In our example, a load/deformation SIGMA/W analysis can get initial PWP conditions from a SEEP/W analysis, so it becomes a child.

There’s still debate among our users and even within our office as to whether this is good or not.  Some say the new analysis should be created with all the material associations made just like a new SEEP/W analysis would do.  Others say that would be misleading because those materials don’t have stress properties defined yet, or that they would typically make a new set of materials anyway. 

Certainly boundary conditions (most of the time) don’t make sense to copy from one analysis kind to another. 

In any case, the way it works today is that if you create a new analysis of a different kind, you start with a clean slate and need to use Draw Materials and other commands to set things up the way you want them.

Conclusions

The most efficient way to work with multiple analyses is to start with your steady-state / static analysis, define it fully, add the next step in the timeline so that as many properties and associations as possible get cloned, and so on. 

If you start by creating a dozen analyses before defining any materials or boundary conditions, you will have to make all those material associations repeatedly, once for each analysis.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to look at a few concepts you’ll find in many GeoStudio dialog boxes that may not be immediately obvious.

[By the way, is "dialog box" a term everyone understands?  Or is it just programmer-speak?  It seems rather old-fashioned to me but I don't know what better to call the things...  Leave me a comment if you do.]

Let’s start by taking a look at KeyIn Materials.

KeyIn Materials is a good example because it demonstrates many features that are common across many other dialog boxes. 

I’ll go through some of the simpler ideas first to get them out of the way.  If you’re already aware of these, bear with me and we’ll get to the good stuff soon.

Names

All objects in GeoStudio 2007 are named.  That’s a great (and long overdue in my opinion) step forward compared to previous versions, where objects were numbered instead.  Object names must be unique, but otherwise there aren’t many restrictions on them, so be descriptive!

The names are used wherever one object links to another (e.g., a material linking to a function), in View Object Information, in reports, and in Sketch Text.

Resizeable

Most of our dialog boxes are resizeable.  We design them to fit a small laptop screen (800×600) but if you have a larger monitor you may benefit by making some of the dialogs larger too–you’ll see more items in the lists and longer names or descriptions.

Dialogs and other windows will also remember their last size and position so you won’t have to resize them every time.

Live

We’ve moved away from having OK & Cancel buttons and made our windows “live”.  As soon as you make a change you see that change reflected in your drawing.

That makes it easier to see the repercussions of any edits you make.  It also avoids confusion with the red ‘X’–many version 6 users didn’t understand why clicking the ‘X’ would lose all their changes (they thought it should work like an OK button but it’s really a Cancel button).

Undo

Dialogs support multiple levels of Undo and Redo.  While you’re in the dialog, undo (or redo) your most recent changes (up to the limit you can specify in Tools – Options).  After you close the dialog all your dialog changes get rolled up into one action you can undo using the toolbar or menu Edit – Undo.

To “cancel” changes you’ve made in a dialog you can just undo them one at a time, or you can close the dialog and hit Undo once.

Right-Click

Right-click on controls or lists for a menu of common operations.  If an item is listed in bold it’s the “default” item.  In a list, the default command happens when you double-click the list.  For a split button, the default command gets run when you click the main portion of the button.

Nested Dialogs

Many times several different menu items are related.  For example, you use KeyIn Materials to define a material, but that material may use a function, and functions are defined using KeyIn Functions. 

Previously you had to use KeyIn Functions first to create your function, then KeyIn Materials to pick it, then ultimately Draw Materials to assign it to a region.

Now many dialogs give you a shortcut.  Often the shortcut isn’t all that well marked, to save precious screen real estate.  In KeyIn Materials, for example, you’ll see a button labeled simply “…”.  Clicking it takes you to the appropriate KeyIn Functions dialog.

And More…

Next week I’ll dig into some of the less obvious concepts, like Cloning and the Assigned button.

Have any tips of your own to share or a topic you’d like me to explore?  Leave a comment or drop me an email!