MADYMO Utility Menu

The MADYMO utility contains utilities, tools, macros and shortcuts to display options.

The MADYMO Utility menu (madymo.mac) is loaded when you open the MADYMO user profile. The menu and its utilities are fully customizable.

The MADYMO Utility menu contains two pages, Tools and Define Entities. Both menu pages contain the following Display options used to control the display of entities in the graphics window.

Table 1.
Option	Description
Body	Turns on and off all ellipsoids, planes, cylinders, and joints.
Elems	Turns on and off all FE elements.
Triads	Turns on and off all coordinate systems.
Shading	Set to visualization mode for the entire model. Four modes are available: 0 Performance graphics wireframe 1 Shaded 2 Shaded with mesh lines 3 Shaded with feature lines
Only Comps/MBs	Turns off all entities except elements, ellipsoids, planes, cylinders, and joints.
Clear Temp Nodes	Removes all temporary nodes (a.k.a. 3D location markers)
Work in Meters	Reduces display size of coordinate system and boundary conditions for modeling in meters.
Autocolor	Colors all ellipsoids, planes, cylinders, and joints based on their rigid body reference. Also colors FE elements by part card.

The Tools page contains a series of utilities and tools:

Table 2.
Option	Description
Set Light Source...	Opens a window with button-based light source options. Click the icon button that corresponds to your preferred direction of the light source, and click the button that corresponds to your preferred level of specularity. Then click Close.
Elems to Ellipsoids	Converts linear elements to ellipsoids. Each element becomes a new body with an ellipsoid. A joint is created between each body. The organize, delete, and mbs joints panels can then be used to move the created ellipsoids to a single rigid body, delete extra bodies and joints, or change the joint type.
Rotate Systems	Used to rotate coordinate systems about their axes.
Resize Ellipsoids	Expands/shrinks ellipsoids about their individual axes.
Mesh Ellipsoids	Used to mesh ellipsoids. Mesh is created to represent the actual geometry of the ellipsoid.
Display Syst IDs	Turns on numerical ID display for specified coordinate systems. Useful for seeing which coordinate system is selected when selecting coincident coordinate systems.
Apply JNTPOS...	Applies contents of JNTPOS file to loaded model. Opens the file browser for selecting the JNTPOS file and applies the Euler parameters for the last time step on all joints contained in the file.
Body Properties...	Opens an editable table of all the rigid bodies in the model listing each body name, center of gravity, mass, and moment of inertia. Also contains non-editable fields for reviewing the body ID and parent body.

Both the Define Entities and Tools pages contain Display options, while the Define Entities page also contains buttons for creating new coordinate systems and location markers in 3D space.

The New Cord Sys options allow you to create the following new coordinate systems:

Parallel Global: Creates new coordinate systems at specified nodes. The created systems are oriented parallel to the global system.
Parallel Local: Creates new coordinate systems at specified nodes. The created systems are oriented parallel to a specified local coordinate system.
From 3 Nodes: Opens the HyperMesh systems panel for created coordinate systems in any orientation by specifying three nodes or temporary nodes.

The New loc marker options allow you to create the following new temporary nodes, which are used as location markers throughout HyperMesh:

At Coord System: Creates a new marker at specified coordinate systems.
At Ellipsoids: Creates new markers at specified ellipsoids’ centers and axis.
Cover Ellipsoids: Covers ellipsoids with new markers.
At Body COGs: Creates new markers at specified rigid bodies’ center of gravities.
At Other: Opens the HyperMesh create nodes panel for creating markers by entering coordinates (local or global), between existing nodes/temp nodes, on a plane, or on CAD geometry.