Mesh Size

Advanced ▸ Mesh Size computes per-node and per-element mesh size and opens a floating panel to inspect the distribution. It works on .mdpa and every supported VTK / mesh format.

What is measured

• Nodal size (NODAL_H) — a faithful port of Kratos' FindNodalHProcess: for each node, the minimum distance to any other node that shares an element. For a linear element this is the shortest incident edge; higher-order geometries include their mid-side nodes, exactly as the Kratos process does.
• Element size (ELEMENT_H) — the element characteristic length, taken as the mean of the element's edge lengths.

The panel

• Colour by — None, Nodal (NODAL_H), or Element (ELEMENT_H). Choosing a measure colours the mesh Field-like (the same colour-mapping and colormap legend as Field visualization), dimming the base mesh to wireframe so the colouring reads clearly.
• Element size distribution — a box-and-whisker plot of the element size: the box spans Q1–Q3 with the median line, the whiskers reach the Tukey fences (Q1 − 1.5·IQR and Q3 + 1.5·IQR), and dots mark the extremes when there are outliers beyond the whiskers.
• Highlight — Smallest and Largest toggle the statistical (IQR) outlier elements as overlays: small in blue, large in red. Frame smallest / largest zooms the 3D view to that group.

Write to mesh

The Write to mesh buttons (NODAL_H, ELEMENT_H, or Both) append the computed fields to the mesh as an undoable operation. Once written they:

• appear in the Field visualization variable dropdown,
• are saved into the file (e.g. Begin NodalData NODAL_H) on Save / Export, and round-trip through the problem archive.

Even without writing them, the computed values are cached on the model's auxiliary store, so they are available to future operations.

From the MCP server

The same computation is exposed to the MCP server as the mesh_size tool: it returns the nodal and element box-whisker statistics plus the IQR-outlier smallest / largest element ids for any supported mesh file, with no VS Code UI.