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3D viewer

The 3D Viewport provides an interactive rendering of the physics simulation.

The catheter's sections render in their setup colors. Pull wires render as dark gray metal lines at the wire's true diameter when its cross-section is specified on the Pullwire Settings page (a flat wire displays at its equal-area round diameter; simulation tendons are round); designs without a wire specification use a nominal display width.

Mouse Controls​

Interact with the 3D view using your mouse:

  • Rotate: Left-click and drag to orbit the camera around the model.
  • Pan: Right-click and drag to move the view vertically and horizontally.
  • Zoom: Use the mouse scroll wheel to move the camera closer to or further from the model.

Preset Views​

Buttons in the upper-right corner of the 3D viewer snap the camera to standard viewing angles. The same snaps are available from the keyboard:

KeyView
1Front
2Back
3Top
4Left side
5Right side
6Iso

About the preset views: The Front, Back, Top, Left, Right, and Iso presets snap the camera to standard angles, but the 3D viewer always renders in perspective projection. The presets are not true orthographic views: there is still some foreshortening, especially at the ends of long catheters. Use them for quick orientation rather than for taking measurements off the screen.

The Axes button (also in the upper-right toolbar) toggles the XYZ axis overlay on and off. The Grid button below it toggles the reference grid, drawn on the floor and on the two far walls of the bounding box; the walls follow the camera as you orbit, so a front or side view gets a full grid background. The squares are a fixed size for reading dimensions off the view: 25 mm in metric units, one inch in imperial (the Units menu switches both), with fainter lines every 5 mm or quarter inch, and the viewer's lower-right corner states the scale while the grid is on. The grid box spans 1.5 times the catheter length from the base. There are no keyboard shortcuts for these toggles; use the buttons.

Exporting the view: The Export button on the Steering Simulation tab writes the current run three ways: an image of the viewport as displayed, grid and scale caption included when the grid is on (PNG or JPEG), the deflected shape as an STL for CAD, 3D printing, or meshing tools, and the run log as CSV. The STL is the deflected centerline swept into a tube at each segment's outer radius, so it is the outer surface only: no layers, and no pullwires. The image and run log also sit under File → Export, which additionally holds the model-level exports (physics simulation spec). See the Menu Bar page for details.