User Guide

Tutorial 2 - Modifying
Version 5.0 53
Close the second view by clicking in the title bar.
Selection Tools
Selections are important to modify and view only parts of the model.
Stated simply, an item is “selected” if it is fully displayed graphically. An item is
“unselected” if, instead of a display of the item, only a gray line shadow of the
item is displayed. All of our model elements are “selected” at this time.
Click on the crossbeam that we just created and you will see that the rendered
shape disappears and that a gray ghost line takes it’s place.
Your model should now look like this:
The crossbeam is now “unselected”.
Currently your mouse cursor is the standard arrow when in the model view.
This indicates that you are in the default selection mode, which simply means that
you can select or unselect one item at a time by clicking on it.
Try this now, click on a few of the lines to see how the members can be
unselected, and then again selected. (Remember, if you double-click you will
open the Information dialog! If you do this by accident click Cancel.)
You can also click on the joint locations to select and unselect individual joints so
try this as well.
Rather than clicking one item at a time you may use RISA-3D’s powerful tools to
help you quickly achieve the selection that you want. They are located on the
vertical Selection toolbar on the left side of the screen.
Note that this toolbar will not be displayed when a spreadsheet is active. Let’s try
the selection tools. Feel free to try all of them as you cannot affect the model
solely by selecting items.