Spherical Clipping Panel

Location: Display toolbar

If you want to work on a small section of a large model without masking or turning off any entities, enable clipping and select the center and the radius of the clipping sphere. Once you have completed working with the clipped section, turn off clipping or select a new clipping center. This allows you to walk through your model while concentrating on small sections at a time. The clipping information is stored along with the model in the database (.hm) file. The auto fit option automatically fits the clipped model to the display after you choose a new center or radius.

Individual elements are not partially clipped. An element is displayed if its centroid is in the clipping sphere. (The same applies for individual segments of a contact surface.)

Geometric entities such as surfaces, lines, and so on are partially clipped.

Clipping affects the entities that you can individually select in the modeling window. Only entities that are in the clipping sphere can be selected. For instance, you cannot pick a node that is on the outside edge of an element that is partially clipped (even though the entire element is shown on the modeling window).

Clipping does not affect the extended entity selection. For instance, if clipping is enabled to show only a few of the displayed surfaces and you choose all displayed surfaces (by extended entity selection) to automesh; all the displayed surfaces will be meshed (as if clipping is disabled). A visual clue of this can be seen as surfaces that are outside the clipping region are highlighted (until you redraw the screen).

While importing a database file into an existing model, the model clipping that currently exists in the session (not the one imported) is honored.

Make sure you have the correct clipping center and radius. Otherwise your model may not appear on the modeling window, leading to confusion. For instance, if an imported model fell outside the clipping radius (and was thus invisible) you might think the import failed.

The center and radius of clipping are stored even when clipping is disabled. When clipping is re-enabled it returns to the previous setting.

You can also "pan" the sphere in the plane of your monitor screen by left-clicking. The sphere re-centers on the point clicked. If you have use the keep centered option, the sphere remains fixed but the model pans to center the point at which you clicked.

You can use the mouse in the modeling window to increase or decrease the sphere's radius. Right-clicking anywhere in the modeling window resets the sphere's radius to the distance between the sphere's current center and the point that you right-clicked. In this way, right-clicking inside the sphere decreases its radius, while right-clicking outside of it increases the radius.

Panel Options

Command Buttons