For freebody plots you can display Forces, Moments, or Forces and Moments simultaneously. This is also true for interface loads. For forced displacement plots these choices are Translational, Rotational or both simultaneously.

For all three types of freebody plots, the resulting vectors can be plotted as either components or resultants.

This option is an easy way to display only the components that you want. By default, vectors in three dimensions will be displayed. You can constrain this to particular planes with respect to the global coordinate system. Only those components will be displayed or, if a resultant display is requested, the resultant will be calculated with respect to that plane only.

You can turn ON or OFF the display of any component or resultant and change their colors with these toggles and color widgets.

Only vectors of freebody or forced displacement plots on free edges of the model will be displayed if this toggle is ON. This essentially will eliminate any internally applied loads or internal reaction loads from the display. This type of display will not work for bar element models.

For Interface Loads only the contributions from each individual node can be plotted simultaneously as well as the total interface load if this toggle is turned ON.

If the Scale Arrows toggle is turned ON then vector lengths will be scaled relative to one another based on their magnitudes. Constant will keep all vector arrows the same length. Both are scaled relative to the a percentage of the screen size.

This is a scale factor to be applied for sizing the vector arrow lengths. By default it is set to 10% of the screen size.

If you wish to see all results whether they are zero or not, turn this toggle OFF.

Sometimes it may appear that some vectors of the freebody plot are not being displayed. This could be because the Hide Results Near Zero toggle is ON and the Zero Tolerance is set too high. Change this tolerance if necessary to view or not to view vectors below this gate value.

Turn this toggle ON or OFF depending on whether you wish to see the values associated with the vector. You also have control of the display of these values.

Values on vectors can be displayed as either fixed (real) values or in exponential form.

You may also set the number of significant digits of the vector label values.

Turn this title on if you wish to display a title with the plot. For more versatile title display, use the Titles utility from the main Display>Titles (p. 403) in the Patran Reference Manual.

Titles can be colored and specified in the textbox. If no title is supplied but the Display Title toggle is ON, a default title will appear.

You may create a title to display in the upper or lower left corners of the screen and specify the font size.

When toggled ON, a hardcopy print command will be generated and sent to the currently selected printer definition under the Print application. If multiple results are selected, then multiple plots will be sent. This does not work when Patran is run in batch mode with no graphics.

If this toggle is turned on the data associated with this plot will be dumped to a file called <db_name>_freebody_data.dat.

If this toggle is ON then the text report will append to any already existing file.

This option will put the session file call to create the freebody plot in the Patran command line. The plot will not be created until you issue a RETURN from the keyboard with the cursor control in the command line. This is useful if you wish to look at multiple plots sequentially. Select all the Result Cases and/or subcases and/or result types, then turn this toggle on. Each time you want to see the subsequent plot press the RETURN key when the focus is in the command line. This will also create a session file called <db_name>_play_freebody.ses.

This will remove any freebody plot from the graphics screen.

This will reset all widgets to their default values and will remove any plot.