Custom menu for show/hide part of the FEM

[Jayaprakash Jayakumar]

Hi all,

We use PyNastran GUI while working on structural repairs for the aircrafts. A common task in our workflow is:

1. Identify the repair location in the FEM

2. Locate the relevant elements in that region

3. Extract element loads from the element force output files (OP2/F06)

Since the aircraft FEM is fairly large, this often requires slicing the model repeatedly to isolate the elements of interest.

A couple of things that would significantly improve our workflow:

1. Model slicing / region filtering
Is there a recommended way in PyNastran to quickly show/hide portions of the model?
For example:

• predefined slices (by coordinate ranges or groups)

• toggling structural regions

• isolating small element sets interactively

2. Labeling aircraft stations in the GUI
It would be extremely helpful if we could display frame stations / aircraft coordinates directly in the GUI (e.g., station markers along the fuselage).

3. Custom GUI tools
Has anyone experimented with:

• custom menus

• Python scripts integrated into the GUI

• shortcuts for common view filters?

The ideal workflow would be something like selecting a menu item such as “Show FS 400–500” or “Slice around selected elements.”

If anyone has implemented something similar (scripts, plugins, workflows, etc.), I’d be very interested to hear about it. 

Also, if this would require custom development and someone is interested in working on such a customization, please feel free to reach out to me directly — I’d be open to paying for development of a practical solution.

Thanks in advance.

Jayaprakash

[Steven Doyle]

I’m glad you find it useful.

It sounds like you should use the groups feature. If you’re calling from the command line, you can use the —groups parameter (two dashes) to enable groups. It’s a bit slower and sometimes you need to reapply results, but it does mostly work.

You can split elements by any integer result type (so property id/material I’d typically). It should also work if you’ve loaded a custom result.

You can manually create new groups from elements, but you cannot show 2+ groups at the same time.

Regarding showing stations, a probe of the NodeID using p or the probe button, will give you the coordinates in the log. I like your idea of a box filter, but I’m not sure how easy it is.

There’s also a text-based grouping that can be picked up by the gui. There should be an example in the root of the model’s directory.

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