What Is Visualization Filtering?

A multibody model can get so complex that you cannot easily tell its components apart. Solids, bodies, and multibody subsystems often hide behind each other, hindering your efforts to examine geometry, pose, and motion on model update or during simulation.

Visualization filtering is a Mechanics Explorer feature that lets you selectively show and hide parts of your model. By showing only those parts that you want to see, you can more easily discern any components placed within or behind other components—such as an engine piston traveling inside a cylinder casing.

The figure shows an example of visualization filtering. Two cylinders, one at the front and one at the rear, are hidden in the model visualization of the TranslationalInterfaceExample featured example. For a tutorial showing how to use visualization filtering, see Selectively Show and Hide Model Components.

Changing Component Visibility

You can show and hide components through a context-sensitive menu accessible in the tree-view pane of Mechanics Explorer. Right-click a model-tree node to open the menu and select the desired option. The figure shows the visualization filtering menu.

Visualization Filtering Options

The visualization filtering menu provides four options for you to select from:

Components You Can Filter

You can filter the visualization of any component with solid geometry. This includes individual solids, bodies, and multibody subsystems. In general, if a subsystem contains at least one Solid block, then you can switch its visualization on and off.

Frames, joints, constraints, forces, and torques have no solid geometry to visualize and therefore cannot be filtered in Mechanics Explorer. You can still open the visualization filtering context-sensitive menu by right-clicking these nodes, but only one option is active—Show Everything.

The tree-view pane identifies any node not being visualized by graying out its name. This includes nodes that can be visualized but are currently hidden and nodes that cannot be visualized at all. The figure shows an example with the grayed-out names of nodes not being visualized.

Model Hierarchy and Tree Nodes

Multibody models are hierarchical in nature. They often contain multibody subsystems comprising body subsystems, each with one or more solids. The tree-view pane of Mechanics Explorer represents such a model structure through nodes arranged hierarchically. A node is a parent node if it contains other nodes, and a child node if it appears under another node. Nodes can simultaneously be children to some nodes and parents to others.

The figure shows portion of the tree-view pane of the TranslationalInterfaceExample featured example. The Half_Cylinder_A node is a child to the Housing_and_Cylinder_Assembly node and a parent to the Fins and Half_Annular_Cylinder nodes.

Filtering Hierarchical Subsystems

Any changes to the visualization settings of a tree node apply equally to all children of that node, if any. Nodes higher up in the model tree are not affected. As shown in the following figure, hiding the Half_Cylinder_A node in the TranslationalInterfaceExample model causes the Fins and Half_Annular_Cylinder nodes (children nodes) to hide, but not the Housing_and_Cylinders_Assembly node (parent node) or the Half_Cylinder_B node (sibling node).

If you want to show part of a subsystem you have previously hidden, you can change the visibility settings for the children nodes that you want to show. For example, if after hiding the Half_Cylinder_A node, you want to show the Fins child node, you need only right-click the Fins node and select Show This. Such changes have no effect on the remainder of the Half_Cylinder_A parent node.

Updating Models with Hidden Nodes

The following apply when you update or simulate a model with previously hidden nodes:

Alternative Ways to Enhance Visibility

Visualization filtering is not the only approach you can use to enhance component visibility in a model. However, it is often the simplest. It is also the only approach that doesn’t require you to modify the model in any way. Alternative approaches you can use include: