Field Visualization

The Field toolbar button (or the Field Visualization command) plots the data arrays stored in the file: NodalData, ElementalData, and ConditionalData for .mdpa, and point / cell data arrays for every VTK and mesh format. While a field is shown, the base mesh dims to wireframe so the coloring or glyphs stand out.

The panel

• Variable — pick any stored array. The dropdown labels each with its source (Nodal / Elemental / Conditional) and rank (scalar / vector).
• Modes — Contour, Quiver, Isosurface, and Deformed shape (see below). Each is an independent toggle, so you can combine any of them at once (e.g. Contour + Quiver, or Deformed + Contour). Modes that don't apply to the current variable are disabled (Quiver / Deformed need a vector; Isosurface needs a scalar).
• Colormap — Rainbow (jet, default), Viridis, Cool-warm, or Grayscale. The choice drives both the 3D coloring and the legend gradient with its min / mid / max tick values.

Contour

Color the mesh by a scalar. Nodal fields are drawn as smooth interpolated point-data; elemental / conditional fields are drawn flat per cell. Vector fields are colored by magnitude. On a volume mesh, boundary faces inherit their owning cell's value.

Quiver

Draw arrow glyphs oriented and scaled by a vector field — at nodes for nodal data, or at cell centroids for elemental / conditional data — colored by magnitude. The Arrow scale slider tunes glyph length so the arrows read clearly whatever the field's units.

Isosurface

Extract the surface where a scalar equals a slider-driven iso value. On volume meshes this uses marching tetrahedra (each cell decomposed into tets); 2D and surface meshes fall back to iso-lines. Drag the Iso value slider to sweep the surface through the field — the surface rebuilds live.

Deformed shape

Warp the geometry by a vector field to visualize displacement — the standard FE post-processing view. The deformation has its own "Deform by" selector (independent of the coloring variable), so you can deform by DISPLACEMENT while coloring by a stress scalar, and a Warp scale slider exaggerates or damps the motion. The warp is global: with Deformed shape on, Contour, Quiver, and Isosurface all render on the deformed geometry, while the undeformed reference mesh stays visible as a wireframe. Combine Deformed + Contour for the canonical "deformed shape colored by displacement" plot.

TIP

See also Mesh size for a related Field-like view of the per-node and per-element mesh size, with a box-and-whisker of the element-size distribution.

TIP

For a Kratos time series, the active variable, mode, and colormap are preserved as you scrub the timeline, so a field animates across the steps.