CAE Viewer - Quick Reference

Guide to Graphical User Interface

Overview
The iChrome's CAE Viewer (powered by Shaper) is a Free, Portable and UserFriendly FEM Visualization tool. It has been designed by iChrome to share
and visualize results either from Shaper native format (*.shp) or from the most
commonts FE third party tools such as Abaqus, Ansys and Nastran (MSC, NX,
NEI).
A typical interaction with the tool follows the steps:
1. creating a new (initially empty) project;
2. importing a FE model from one of the supported third party solvers (such
as Abaqus, Ansys and Nastran) or from a native Shaper le;
3. importing relevant results
The CAE Viewer also allows saving loaded projects. When saving a project
users will save the initial FEM model and any loaded result as part of the
project - no need then to reimport results on already saved projects.

CAE Viewer GUI Components

The Graphical interface of the CAE Viewer has two main components:
viewports used to visualise 3D models. CAE Viewer has been designed to
oer a multi-viewport environment. Accordingly users can operate with
dierent viewports at the same time to display dierent sets of results.
Viewports can be syncronized to assure the same camera viewpoint.
views are used to provide and display additional information. There are two
main views in CAE Viewer: a Logging View from where users can check
logging messages issued by the CAE Viewer when loading a model in
memoty and the so-called Set View where the set dened in the model are
listed.

The software described in this document is furnished under a license agreement.

The software may be used only under the terms of the license agreement.

No

part of this manual may be photocopied or reproduced in any form without prior
written consent from iChrome ltd.
iChrome ltd.

Grapheme and its logos are trademarks of

Figure 1: CAE-Viewer GUI components

Views

have a Control Menu, which is activated by right clicking on the view 's
tab and allows the user to manipulate, resize and move the view within the
tab folders and a Contextual Toolbar typically containing operations that apply
to the specic contents of the View. Alternatively, Views can be organised by
dragging and dropping them in the user designated area.
Hidden views can be displayed by selecting them from the Window
Show
View menu. To reset the original set and layout of Grapheme Views, called
Perspective, click on Window
Reset Perspective.
Views

Figure 2: Default CAE-Viewer Perspective

The software described in this document is furnished under a license agreement.

The software may be used only under the terms of the license agreement.

No

part of this manual may be photocopied or reproduced in any form without prior
written consent from iChrome ltd.
iChrome ltd.

Grapheme and its logos are trademarks of

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Viewports and Viewport Toolbar

The CAE Viewer has a default area to host 3D rendring viewports designed to
contains one or more active Viewports. Each Viewport displays the imported
model independently and could be thus congured to visualise specic information and/or results. Users modify viewports contents and visualized results via
the main viewport toolbar

Figure 3: Viewport Toolbar

Moving from the left to the right:

allows to save the viewport contents as an image;

view point handling:

allows to syncronize the current viewport with the others (if multiple viewports opened at the same time);

allows to t current view to screen, i.e. resize the model in the

viewport so that the whole model is displayed;

allows selecting the point of view among the default ones (top,
left, right, bottom, front, rear and isometric);

visualization mode:




allows selecting the model visualization mode among the supported ones (wireframe only, Feature Edges only, Fill only, Fill and
Wireframe, Fill and Feauture Edges)
shows or hides model features (nodes, elements)

contour result selection:

allows selecting which result value should be used to generate

model contour coloring;

allows conguring contour options (colors, legend, ranges, interpolation schemes, etc);

allows selecting result location, i.e. the integration point from

which selected result should be extracted from. By default CAE
Viewer will select the rst location with a valid result for the selected
contour quantity

deformation result selection:

The software described in this document is furnished under a license agreement.

The software may be used only under the terms of the license agreement.

No

part of this manual may be photocopied or reproduced in any form without prior
written consent from iChrome ltd.
iChrome ltd.

Grapheme and its logos are trademarks of

5



allows selecting which result values should be used as deformation

eld for the model so that a deformed model will be superimposed
to the initially underformed one
shows or hides the underformed model

result point selection:

allows moving forward one step (if the analysis provides results
for more steps, load subcases, etc)

allows moving backward one step (if the analysis provides results
for more steps, load subcases, etc)

displays and allow selecting result point to be displayed among

the available ones

visualization mode:

allows selectin the overall visualization mode (by material, by

section, by sets if any of these information are available)

Working with CAE Viewer

Creating a new (empty) model

The CAE Viewer works around the idea that FEM models and relevant results
shall contribute to a single project. To start using the tool you will then need
to create a new project. This can be done from the welcome page or from the
main toolbar ( ). Once a new project is created, CAE Viewer allows you to
start importing a FEM model and relevant results.
Importing a FEM model

To import a new FEM model (among the supported formats), you will need to
launch the Import Model Wizard from tha main toolbar ( ). This will open
up the Import Model Wizard:

The software described in this document is furnished under a license agreement.

The software may be used only under the terms of the license agreement.

No

part of this manual may be photocopied or reproduced in any form without prior
written consent from iChrome ltd.
iChrome ltd.

Grapheme and its logos are trademarks of

Figure 4: Import Model Wizard

Importing FEM results

Once a FEM model (i.e. mesh plus optional information) has been loaded in
the CAE-Viewer, you can start importing results. To do that, you will need to
launch the Import Results Wizard from tha main toolbar ( ). This will open
up the Import Results Wizard:

The software described in this document is furnished under a license agreement.

The software may be used only under the terms of the license agreement.

No

part of this manual may be photocopied or reproduced in any form without prior
written consent from iChrome ltd.
iChrome ltd.

Grapheme and its logos are trademarks of

Figure 5: Import Results Wizard: driver selector on rst page, result selector
on second page

The software described in this document is furnished under a license agreement.

The software may be used only under the terms of the license agreement.

No

part of this manual may be photocopied or reproduced in any form without prior
written consent from iChrome ltd.
iChrome ltd.

Grapheme and its logos are trademarks of