Use reference groups to organize your FEM more efficiently

Reference Groups

Overview

One method of organizing and arranging groups to help display the desired entities in a model is the Reference Groups capability. Using Reference Groups you can manipulate existing groups and essentially define groups of groups.
As an example, this fuselage model has a number of groups that divide the model into its general components already set up. So, suppose we wanted to view all of the elements that make up the fuselage skin, we can essentially add all the necessary groups as reference groups to the Skin group, making it easy to select but without changing the group definitions.

      reference-groups-1

Instructions

Please follow these step-by-step instructions:
  1. You can access Reference Groups by right‐clicking on a group name and selecting Reference Groups in the drop down menu.
    accessing the referenced groups dialog
  2. The desired groups can then be selected in the Referenced Groups dialog.
    referenced groups dialog
This results in the selected collection of groups that display the desired elements, for the fuselage skin in this example.
      
      reference-groups-4

Note, the group icon also changes to indicate that there are referenced child groups.



Video Demonstration



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