Option

Description

Body

Turns on and off all ellipsoids, planes, cylinders, and joints.

Elems

Turns on and off all FE elements.

Triads

Turns on and off all coordinate systems.

Shading

Set to visualization mode for the entire model.  Four modes are available:

0        Performance graphics wireframe

1        Shaded

2        Shaded with mesh lines

3        Shaded with feature lines

Only Comps/MBs

Turns off all entities except elements, ellipsoids, planes, cylinders, and joints.

Clear Temp Nodes

Removes all temporary nodes (a.k.a. 3D location markers)

Work in Meters

Reduces display size of coordinate system and boundary conditions for modeling in meters.

Autocolor

Colors all ellipsoids, planes, cylinders, and joints based on their rigid body reference.  Also colors FE elements by part card.

Option

Description

Set Light Source…

Opens a window with button-based light source options. Click the icon button that corresponds to your preferred direction of the light source, and click the button that corresponds to your preferred level of specularity. Then click Close.

Elems to Ellipsoids

Converts linear elements to ellipsoids.  Each element becomes a new body with an ellipsoid.  A joint is created between each body.  The organize, delete, and mbs joints panels can then be used to move the created ellipsoids to a single rigid body, delete extra bodies and joints, or change the joint type.

Rotate Systems

Used to rotate coordinate systems about their axes.

Resize Ellipsoids

Expands/shrinks ellipsoids about their individual axes.

Mesh Ellipsoids

Used to mesh ellipsoids. Mesh is created to represent the actual geometry of the ellipsoid.

Display Syst IDs

Turns on numerical ID display for specified coordinate systems.  Useful for seeing which coordinate system is selected when selecting coincident coordinate systems.

Apply JNTPOS…

Applies contents of JNTPOS file to loaded model.  Brings up file browser for selecting the JNTPOS file and applies the Euler parameters for the last time step on all joints contained in the file.

Body Properties…

Opens an editable table of all the rigid bodies in the model listing each body name, center of gravity, mass, and moment of inertia. Also contains non-editable fields for reviewing the body ID and parent body.