The options used to generate contours can be edited by selecting the Contour Options command in the Data menu. The items in the Contour Options dialog are as follows:
There are two tabs associated with the Contour Options dialog. The options described below are for the General options. The Grid Layers options are used when contouring 3D grids.
There are 3 main types of contours: linear, color filled, and both linear and color filled.
The default method is Normal linear contours and causes the contours to be displayed as piece-wise linear strings.
If the Color fill between contours option is selected, the region between adjacent contour lines is filled with a solid color. There is also a smooth option available. When this option is turned on the color between contour lines varies according to the color ramp. The transparency of the filled contours can also be adjusted.
This option shows linear contours on top of color filled contours.
The Bold every... option can be used to display contours at selected intervals with a thicker line width.
The Label every... option can be used to plot labels on contours at selected intervals. The contour label options are edited using the Contour Labels dialog.
The values shown in the Data range section correspond to the maximum and minimum values in the active data set. These values are sometimes useful when choosing an appropriate contour interval.
This option is only applicable is your contours are colored according to a color ramp, and your data set has more than one time step. If this option is on, the maximum and minimum color ramp colors will be displayed for every timestep. Otherwise, the maximum and minimum colors apply to the entire data set and therefore will only appear when the current data set contains the data set maximum or minimum value.
Regardless of which option is selected for the contour interval, a maximum and a minimum contour value can be specified and the contouring can be restricted to the specified range. If desired, the fill below or fill above options can be turned on to color fill above/below the specified range.
Four Contour Interval options are provided. The contour interval defines the values associated with the contours. Based on the option selected, the contour values are computed and displayed in the spreadsheet. The colors of the contours will also be displayed if a color ramp is being used.