You know I've used a lot of pre/postprocessors in my days (think: 30+ exp.), and I think very highly of Altair's Hypermesh. It's out of scope to tell why but, darn it, Hypermesh is da bomb!! (that's what GenZers say 'it rules')
But one butt whole of a thing that HM 'successes' at, is the INABILITY to control the views of model well and somewhat intuitively. If I were a software developer in this niche field of CAE, I know I could make the OMG-the-mostest-and-bestest of User Interface for users but I guess many don't have that insight (this is not hubris on my part; it's a spanking for not being customer-oriented or minded)
A CAD/CAE/PrePostprocessor SHOULD/must have is:
Panning -
Rotation -
Zooming -
SCREEN CLOCKing -
Lock in a point of rotation -
AND!!!! BE ABLE TO DO THIS MICRO-STEPPINGLY (continuously)
Admittedly, there are not many smart developers out there that knows to include and make provisions for monitor SCREEN-NORMAL CLOCKING (kudos to Solidworks and femap for being aware enough)
HYPERWORKS panning and rotation (and a little finicky CTRL-MMB center of rotation) is good but how much better it could be. anyway… zooming is half alright, too I guess. Mouse Wheel Roll. BUT! only the wheel??? pretty cut and dry…
So Now…
Let's see what successes.
Micro Zoom and Micro Screen-Normal Clocking (SNClocking) is not there at least with simple user interface ways. HM has really got to copy Solidworks or Femap basic functionality. (There is a cop-out workaround, for community members interested, see: *setoption rotation_angle=1.7837777225777356 hm_viewcw for insights) but in any case, it successes for ease of normal user interaction with the model.
Talking Zoom… Some highly disorganized and disjoint information about our software suggests ALT-RMB micro-zooms or zooms at all WHICH IT DOES NOT! and instead brings up the wagonwheel thingy shown below (actually I should see about learning this; could be useful possibly). The wheel zoom steps are sooooo coarse! and I haven't found something of a *setoption zoom_steps in the highly disorganized and half-hearted pool of tcl documentation. I might not know something, but HOW DO YOU ZOOM A BIT BETTER (finely) and WHAT ABOUT THOSE WITHOUT a Wheel Mouse (and don't say there isn't any without a wheel these days).
About SN-Clocking(SNClock)…
There exists rotational arrows that get exposed when you hover over the coordinate system Triad icon down left of the workspace. Try pushing on that, as it jerks around in rotation. At least it's there (I swear I looked all over for this function before I found it). The way to control that is, like I mentioned above, where the tcl setting affects BOTH tcl and GUI rotations. But Darn IT!!! it's so cumbersome when one needs dynamicism with different on-the-fly stepping to get certain 3D view to line up upright (for documentation purposes) Absolutely ugly. I wrote a script before that takes two points/nodes and computes screen rotation necessary to orient that vector straight up (thus the decimal places in the tcl command above) What the… (go copy solidworks and/or femap please, Altair!)
Now I'm mentioning this as if this is the only workaround. I AM A NEWBIE to HM so if anyone knows user interactive solution for this (or other things) please chime in.
Thanks.
Had to get this off my chest. But, Hypermesh from what I've experienced so far is GREAT at doing something that is pivotal and other software just can't handle. The internal ID business is SO ANNOYING though. There are shortcomings like all software but I'd say Hypermesh is clearly the best thing out there.
