Section View with adapting contour plot legend

Feature Requests
1

One more FR from me, closely related to the previous one (cyclic symmetry). Currently, the Section View tool works very well in postprocessing but it could be further improved by making the contour plot legend adapt to it. What I mean is that the legend doesn’t change to show only values on the visible part of the model and remove the ones from the other side of the cut.

Here’s an example. The way the cyclic symmetry is defined (described in my previous FR) may cause such distortions in stress plots:

before cut
before cut1138×740 280 KB

It would be great to be able to hide them. Since currently individual elements can’t be hidden (this was discussed before), the Section View cut is the best tool to hide these spurious concentrations and read correct stress values from the middle of the twisted shaft. However, you can see that the legend remains unchanged upon the cut and the inside of the shaft is completely colored in blue:

after cut
after cut1074×817 205 KB

It’s possible to manually change the legend limits and to probe the correct values in the middle of the shaft using the Query tool but it would be nice to have such automatic cut-off for section views as well. However, it could be difficult to implement it so it’s just a loose suggestion in case it turns out to be relatively easy to add after all.

2

That is an interesting observation. Do you from experience how Abaqus handles it?

If I remember correctly it would not be so easy to implement in real time. But I would have to check the code behind it in more detail.

3

In fact, this feature request was inspired by the way Abaqus handles section views. Here’s how it looks like there for the same model:

before cut abq
before cut abq1051×738 226 KB

after cut abq
after cut abq1031×743 177 KB

As you can see, the contour plot is adapted to the section view and the legend changes accordingly, revealing the desired stress distribution in the middle of the shaft that would otherwise be covered by stress concentrations at the front face. So the software apparently recomputes the legend to account only for values on the visible part of the model.

But indeed it might be hard to implement such a feature.

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