The short answer is no. DX does not support FE's edge, face, or body centered nodes directly. You've thought of the two workarounds, (add nodes, then cubically connect to existing nodes, increasing the number of connection elements dramatically; or drop nodes that do not form the corners of "DX" cubes), so now you pick yer poison.
Remember that DX is a visualization program with some analytical capability, not an analysis program with some visualization capability, so you can't expect it to be perfect for all applications, like FE. If in fact the edges deform noticeably at edge-centered vertices, I'd say you need to increase the cube resolution by adding a body centered and face centered nodes and constructing the denser mesh. I would assume (having done this long ago) that the mesh is not fully regular to start with, so you'll have to do this connection-generation operation in a preprocessing code that reads the FE and writes the DX files. If by some lucky chance, the nodes ARE fully regular in spatial layout, you could use DX Construct module to recreate a regular mesh with regular cubic connectivity by simply specifying origins, deltas (of length 1/2 cube), counts (2*cube count + 1) in the 3 dimensions, then Replace this mesh's positions onto your imported field as the positions, then Replace the connections of the Construct mesh also onto the resultant field, and viola, you have a regular mesh of higher density. It's never that easy though... On the other hand, do the experiment where you drop the edge centered nodes and just look at the visualization. If you have a reasonably large number of cubes in your data object, you probably can't see the difference since the values of adjacent cubes will interpolate across the boundaries and smooth the whole representation. I'd do that first. This can be done more easily (though again probably in a preprocessor) by simply ignoring the edge-centered nodes when you construct the connections array. They can happily co-exist in the positions array alongside referenced positions, so you could still use ShowPositions (and maybe AutoGlyph) to show where they are and then zoom in to see if the cubic sides that connect corner vertices deviate too much from the edge centered vertices. If they do not, the visualization is almost certainly representative of the behavior. If they do (deviate substantially), you better increase the mesh resolution for DX (solution 1 above). (Maybe we better add this to the FAQ, David... it keeps coming up.) Chris Pelkie Vice President/Scientific Visualization Producer Conceptual Reality Presentations, Inc. 30 West Meadow Drive Ithaca, NY 14850 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
