InStep - Help

3D View

User Interface

The 3D View allows the user to see what data is loaded and provides basic interaction with the data. There are cases when no data might be visible: if a FE mesh is loaded and the configurations are set to simply load the data (Import/Export>Surface Mesh> None), no visual representation is generated (by default). This is to reduce issues that might be related to loading very large files which would take a very long time to extract and generate the visual representation, which is often not required for simply converting from one format to another. If the surface representation is required, it can be enabled in the settings or manually started through the Surface Extraction tool.

The basic interaction with the 3D view is through the mouse:
- Left Mouse Button (LMB) and drag: Rotate View
- RMB: Pan
- MMB/Scroll Wheel: Zoom

Alternatively, the same functions can also be done in cases where a middle mouse button (MMB) may not be available (laptop for example). In that case, using a Left Mouse + Ctrl combination is the equivalent to Zoom.

The rotation of the view is by default around the center of the data. In order to make rotation around a specific point of interest more convenient, the rotation point can be re-assigned by middle button clicking (or pressing down the scroll wheel) over the location of interest. Rotation will now be relative to this point until the display is either refreshed (F5/double click), a new point is picked or a standard view set.

In addition to using the mouse for rotate/pan/zoom, a 3D Mouse from 3dconnexion can be used. If such a device is present, it can be enabled during start up from the configuration settings.

Note that if a body is selected for an operation such as deletion or inflation, a selection of the body is made visible in the display when the operation is started.