D3PLOT 22.1

ENTITY Switching the Display of Entity Categories On/Off

ENTITY Switching the display of entity categories on/off

You can use BLANKING to control the visibility of selected nodes and elements, but sometimes you may wish to remove a complete category of entity type from the display list. The ENTITY menu provides this capability: when an entity category is switched off it is never displayed in subsequent plots (of any type) until explicitly turned back on again.

The entity panel also controls label display and the display of entity names. By default only the elements in a model are drawn, with no labels, node symbols or other information appended to them.

You can add extra information to plots, control the display of classes of information and label items dynamically on the screen using the menu. This can be accessed in 3 ways, the shortcut key E, the top bar menu DISPLAY > ENTITIES or the button ENT . This panel controls the display of elements and nodes, (i.e. basic "structural" items); also their symbols, labels and local direction triads as well as the display of "other" items, such as constraints, contacts, rigidwalls, etc; and also their labels, symbols and other related displayable data.

It must be stressed that these commands only permit or deny the display of classes of information, they do not control the visibility of individual items or models.

For example they might be used to enable the display of nodes. This would permit nodes in any models to be displayed provided they were not made invisible by some other command.

The left hand column of the panel dictates the display of the right hand column. At any one time a "master" category will be selected from the left-hand column (in this example Elements is selected). The "master" categories each contain further "child" categories below them. The right hand column displays the appropriate "child" categories for the selected "master".

The Label columns control whether or not the items will be labelled (with the information selected under Label with. The Drawn columns control whether or not the items will be drawn. "Child"categories can be controlled individually (in the example shown the display of beams has been turned off), however they cannot be set so as to be drawn or labelled if the "master" category is not set to be (setting a "child" to be on will automatically switch the "master" setting on).

Some Ansys LS-DYNA entity types can have a name defined for them. The Name columns control which items will have their names displayed if they are defined. Both the label and name of an entity can be displayed at the same time.

Label with determines what is actually drawn as a "label" when labelling is selected for an element or node class.

Selecting multiple labelling categories will lead to compound labels being generated (eg M1/H1001/P12/ ).

As this example illustrates different models may contain different entity types. Where all currently selected models contain a type (for example Shells here) the selection box has a white background, whereas if only a subset do then the box will have a grey background to denote its "mixed" status.

Triad Options

From version 21 onwards the display of element and material triads has been speeded up and a number of new options have been added to control how the triads are displayed.

These options include

Triad + X, Y, Z labels
Coloured Triad (x axis Red, y axis Green, z axis Blue)
X Axis Only
Y Axis Only
Z Axis Only

The default option is to display the complete Triad with X, Y and Z labels.

New options have also been added that control the line width and the size of the triad symbols.

The following preferences can be used to change the default Triad properties.

d3plot*triad_mode	Controls the display mode for Element and Material Triad Symbols. This can be set to : TRIAD+LABELS, COLOURED_TRIAD, X-AXS_ONLY, Y-AXS_ONLY, Z-AXS_ONLY
d3plot*triad_size	Display triads using either a FIXED size or an AUTOMATIC size
d3plot*triad_fixed_size	Size used for FIXED size triads
d3plot*triad_line_width	Line width in pixels used for drawing triads
d3plot*triad_x_axis_colour	Colour of X axis when “triad_mode” is set to “COLOURED_TRIAD”
d3plot*triad_y_axis_colour	Colour of Y axis when “triad_mode” is set to “COLOURED_TRIAD”
d3plot*triad_z_axis_colour	Colour of Z axis when “triad_mode” is set to “COLOURED_TRIAD”

Controlling the number of labels displayed

Displaying a large number of labels can be very slow and plots will become very cluttered if too much information is displayed. By default D3PLOT will generate a warning if the labelling options selected generate more than 1000 labels.

The on screen warning is only displayed the 1st time this label limit is reached and the choice to either ignore the limit or to change the limit will be given.

The default number of labels that D3PLOT displays before generating a warning can be changed used the preference option

d3plot*max_labels:

1000

The on screen warning message can also be disabled by setting the following preference to FALSE.

d3plot*label_warning:

FALSE

At any time the label limit can be reset or modified using the options in the entity panel.

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