Plot Motion Results

You can access the Plot Manager by clicking the Display the Plot Manager icon on the motion animation toolbar.

The Plot Manager window is dockable, and you can search and filter results on both the Plot and Edit tabs. Specific features include:

Plotting

Use the Plot tab to select which motion analysis results to show on the plot.

• Quickly generate plots in the default Surf mode. Surfing allows you to quickly browse your results. Alternatively, you can turn surfing off and simply use the Apply button to plot specific components.
• Click Apply to commit the curves to the plot. Make sure to choose data of the same type on the Y axis. If you see an asterisk next to the legend label, it means that result has not been committed to the plot.
• Click the Clear button to remove all results from the plot.
• The Plot Manager also allows you to load data from a .csv file that you can then plot alongside your motion analysis results. This is useful for comparing results to test data or to overlay results from a different model or analysis. To use this feature, click the folder icon underneath the Plot tab to load your data, and then plot the data channels from the CSV Files container in the plot browser tree.
  
  
• When importing .csv data, specify the units in the column headers, as shown here:
  
  

Creating Pages

Use the icons at the top of the Plot Manager to mange plot templates and pages. You can:

• Import and save plots as templates.
• Delete all pages and restore a single blank page.
• Load a saved template.
• Create and delete plot pages.
• Undo (Ctrl + Z) or redo (Ctrl + Y) the last operation.
• Change the layout of the plots on the pages.
• Swap the X and Y axes for the active plot .
• Step through the pages using the arrow buttons .

Note that the currently active plot is shown with a red title.

Creating Cross Plots

The X-axis uses time by default, but you can also plot data vs. data (cross plots).

• When plotting vs. time, there is a vertical time line that is draggable and is linked to the animation.
• Click to plot data vs. data.
• When cross plotting, you'll see a time bubble instead of a time line.

Editing Plots

Use the Edit tab to change attributes of the plot, including:

• Curve properties such as line thickness, line style, color, etc.
• Plot title
• Axis labels
• Axis limits

When in the Edit tab, you can also replace a curve using the right-click context menu.

Tips

• To create a two-line plot title, click the title to edit it and and press Enter after the first line. Changes can be finalized by pressing Shift+Enter or by clicking outside the entry dialog.
• If the Load Saved Template icon is grayed out, it means there isn't a plot template file with a name that matches your model name in the standard templates location ...\Documents\Altair\Inspire\MotionPlotTemplates.
• If you have forgotten to manually save your changes, look for the last auto-saved version at this location: ...\Documents\Altair\Inspire\MotionPlotTemplates\autosave.

If you create or author a plot using the Plot Manager, you can use the Show during analysis option to show it live during the motion analysis. This also works for cross plots where the x-axis is not Time.

The live plot will remain displayed between runs until you manually close the plot.

Enabling the Freeze option on an authored plot specifies that after the next run, a copy of the newly plotted curve will be automatically generated at the end of the motion analysis. This frozen copy of the curve will persist on the plot during each subsequent analysis, allowing you to compare motion runs.

This feature works best when used in combination with the Show during analysis option, which creates a persistent live plot. It allows you to compare changes against frozen curves from prior runs without needing to invoke the Plot Manager after each motion analysis.

The Remove frozen curves option is a convenient way of deleting all of the frozen curves at once, and is available from the context menu on a live plot when reviewing motion results.