The "Material" Data Available Depends Upon the Files Present
The "material" data available depends upon the files present
Complete state files (.ptf)These files are always present, and contain part data for:
- All parts (materials) of solid, shell, thick shell, beam and SPH elements.
- All nodal rigid bodies
- All discrete and seatbelt elements.
Category (1) may be extracted and processed numerically (in and ), and visually (in 2D3D plotting) because the part numbers of these element classes are known.
Category (2), nodal rigid bodies, may be listed as a category under ; however they cannot be plotting because their underlying nodes are not known.
Category (3), discrete and seatbelt element part data, cannot be processed from .ptf files alone because these files do not contain information about these elements.
ZTF files
If a .ztf file has been written from PRIMER then it becomes possible both to visualise discrete and seatbelt elements, and also to determine their part numbers. Therefore it is possible to associate part data with elements for these types, and process them in the same way as solids, shells, etc.
This also means that discrete and seatbelt elements can be selected and processed "by part" for operations such as blanking, picking, and so on.
XTF files
If an .xtf file is present, which will increasingly not be the case, as it is not supported by MPP versions of Ansys LS-DYNA, then discrete and seatbelt elements can be visualised; but the file does not contain the information required to associate these element types with their part ids as defined in the Ansys LS-DYNA keyword input deck, so their part-based data cannot be accessed.
D3PLOT automatically "culls" from part listings, menus, etc those parts which either do not contain any elements or for which the element type cannot be determined. The only time that they become visible is when a , listing is produced.