Tutorials

Each tutorial below is a complete short analysis, from importing data to a result worth looking at. They are the fastest way into MTEX, and they are meant to be run rather than read: every documentation page is an executable script, so you can open one, step through it section by section, and change the numbers to see what depends on what.

edit EBSDTutorial

They are also deliberately incomplete. A tutorial shows one path through a subject and says little about the choices made along the way; the chapters they link into are where those choices are explained. If a tutorial does something to your data that you did not expect, the chapter is the place to look, not the tutorial.

Which one to start with

That depends on how your data was measured, and the split is genuine rather than cosmetic.

If you have orientation maps - data measured point by point across a surface, from EBSD - start with EBSD. It imports a map, plots it, and reconstructs grains. Follow it with Grains for measuring those grains and Grain Boundaries for what lies between them. Those three in order are a reasonable first hour with MTEX.

If you have diffraction data - pole figures from X-ray or neutron measurement - start with Pole Figure Data, which imports pole figures and reconstructs an orientation distribution from them, and continue with ODFs for working with the result.

ODFs is worth reading in either case. An orientation distribution is the common language between the two kinds of measurement, and it is what lets a map and a pole figure be compared at all.

VPSC is narrower: it reads the output of the visco-plastic self-consistent deformation code, for readers who arrive with modelling results rather than measurements.

Before you start

Two things repay a few minutes in advance.

General Concepts explains the habits that run through all of MTEX - that a variable holds a whole list rather than one object, and how to select a subset of it. Almost every tutorial line uses both.

Reference Frame matters if you are importing your own map. The coordinate system the stage moved in and the one the Euler angles were written in need not agree, and when they disagree everything still runs and every result is quietly rotated. The tutorials use data where this is already settled; your own data is not.

Next

After the tutorials, the chapters they draw on are EBSD, Grains, Grain Boundaries, Pole Figures and ODF. The underlying objects - directions, rotations, orientations, symmetry - start at Vectors and Crystal Geometry.