• Overview is a brief overview of MSC.AFEA and the Marc Preference and explains its operation and some customization capabilities. It also gives a general view of the capabilities and where to locate some of the standard functionality.

• Building A Model is meant to be mostly a model building reference containing explanations of how to create meshes, coordinates, materials, element properties, loads, boundary conditions including contact bodies, table or field data, load cases and multi-point constrains as they pertain to creating a valid Marc input file.

• Running an Analysis is also mostly a reference chapter but for analysis specific setup parameters. The details of specifying analysis solutions, solution parameters, contact control, contact tables, output requests, translation parameters, etc., are given in this Chapter.

• Read Results explains how to read results back into the Patran database (or to attach to a results file) and what actual Marc results file POST codes (result types) are supported for postprocessing.

• Exercises is a tutorial which covers many aspects of proper usage of the Preference. This is where most new user’s to MSC.AFEA and the Marc Preference should start.

• Supported Keywords is a reference that lists all the supported Marc input file keywords and indicates the location in this guide for explanation on how to set up the input in the Preference to obtain these keywords in your input file.

• Transition Guide is a reference helps users transition to the Marc Preference from other
analysis codes.