MomentOfInertia Plugin
MomentOfInertia
plugin keeps up-to-date tensor of inertia for every cell. Internally, it uses
parallel axis theorem to calculate most up-to-date tensor of inertia. While, the plugin
can be called directly:
<Plugin Name="MomentOfInertia"/>
most commonly it is called indirectly by other plugins like e.g. LengthConstraint
plugin.
MomentOfInertia
plugin gives users access (via Python scripting) to
current lengths of cell’s semiaxes. Examples in Demos/PluginDemos/MomentOfInertia
demonstrate how to get lengths of semiaxes. For example, to get semiaxes lengths for
a given cell
, in Python we would type:
axes=self.momentOfInertiaPlugin.getSemiaxes(cell)
axes
is a 3-component vector with 0th element being length of
minor axis, 1st – length of median axis (which is set to 0 in
2D) and 2nd element indicating the length of major semiaxis.
Note
Important: Because calculating lengths of semiaxes involves quite a
few of floating point operations it may happen (usually on hexagonal
lattice) that for cells composed of 1, 2, or 3 pixels one moment the
square of one of the semiaxes may end up being slightly negative leading
to NaN
(not a number) length. This is due to round-off error and whenever
CC3D detects very small absolute value of square of the length of
semiaxes (10-6) it sets length of this semiaxes to 0.0
regardless
whether the squared value is positive or negative. However, it is a good
practice to test whether the length of semiaxis is sane by adding a simple
if
statement as shown below (here we show how to test for a NaN
):
if length != length:
print "length is NaN":
else:
print "length is a proper floating point number"