Plotting Options

There are many ways of viewing structural response in terms of plots using Dr. Frame3D. The figures below show some typical cases in which moments, shears, and displacements are being plotted dynamically:

Fully rendered displaced shape	Lines only displaced shape
Strong and weak axis moments	Strong and weak axis shears

Displaced shape and moment and shear plotting is enabled via the Plots menu:

The plot cycling commands are particularly handy for quickly moving between plots. Note also that the feedback pane always indicates what quantities are currently displayed:

There are different sign conventions for moments in different countries and contexts--by default Dr. Frame3D plots moments on the compression face of members, but this can be changed via the Plot Scales section of the model pane inspector table:

Changing the sign of the Moment Scale will change the sign of the moment plotting.

Current preference settings can be saved so that your preferred sign convention will become the default by selecting the Preferences... command in the Edit menu.

To find out more about how values can be labeled, see the section Working with Labels.

Displacement plotting is most easily turned off and on by typing the 'u' key, or one can use the Plots>Show Displaced Shape command (with cmd/ctrl-U short-cut).

In addition to plotting absolute quantities, one can plot values as a percentage of the member's capacity:

See the Design section for more details on the plotting of capacity values.

To toggle this feature, use the Normalize Values command in the Modeling menu.

Rescaling

Due to the nature of real-time modeling, manual adjustment of plot scales is important. There are various controls on the scaling portion of the toolbar that dynamically rescale plots:

Simply click and hold down the desired control button, and the relevant plots will rescale dynamically.

The same plot scales are used for depicting internal and applied forces and moments.

Plots can also be rescaled via the plot scale dialog described above, but this is relatively inconvenient. However, if one is trying to compare plots in different windows visually, using the dialog is the only way to ensure that the plots are using the same scale.