Shapes

Shapes are collections of perturbations from the initial configuration of the FE mesh before the morph.

When you morph your model, HyperWorks stores the morph internally as a collection of perturbations which you can then undo or redo. When you create a shape using the Shapes tool, the node perturbations are stored in the new shape entity along with biasing factors for the perturbations and details such as the biasing style. HyperWorks takes the difference between the initial state of the model and the current state of the model when creating a new shape. Creating shapes allows you to generate shape variables for optimization and store model changes for parametric studies.

When you create a shape, vectors are drawn for each node perturbation for the shape. The vectors are drawn the exact length of the perturbation.

Once a shape is saved, you can apply it to your model with any given scaling factor. Applying a shape in this way is like any other morphing operation and can be undone, redone, or saved as part of another shape.