I was hoping a future feature that might be available in PrePoMax would be the ability to manually create nodes and elements as well as shifting the locations of nodes after a mesh was imported or generated.
Manual creation of nodes and elements is rather uncommon but modification of nodal coordinates can be useful sometimes (for now, there’s a tool to update nodal coordinates from .inp file).
it can be useful to create simple model such as truss/frame or plate.
commonly feature to generate models are using method of sweeping (translate & rotate) of an object
- point to line
- line to plane
- plane to solid
meshing by dividing of line or plane element also common in standard FE pre-processor.
however, this can be a lot or huge effort in development so i’m only guessed it may not in priority.
there’s many external software available e.g CalculiX GraphiX (CGX), Salome and GMSH