Opening a Preview
The raw text editor is the default for .mdpa and mesh files — the preview opens as a separate custom editor next to (or instead of) the text, so the file text is always one click away.
Three ways to open
- Editor-title button — open the file in the text editor, then click the preview icon in the top-right editor toolbar.
- Explorer context menu — right-click the file in the Explorer and choose Open MDPA Preview (for
.mdpa) or Open VTK Preview (for any mesh format). - Command Palette (
Ctrl+Shift+P/Cmd+Shift+P) — run Kratos MDPA: Open MDPA Preview or Kratos VTK: Open VTK Preview. Palette commands also cover Reset Camera, Toggle Node IDs, Compute Mesh Quality, Field Visualization, and Find Entity by ID for the active preview.
A tour of the window
The window has three regions:
The sidebar (left)
A scrollable panel of collapsible sections, from top to bottom:
- Information — the stats panel: node / element / condition / geometry counts,
SubModelPartscount, detected 2D / 3D dimensionality, the mesh bounding box, and any element type names that could not be mapped to a drawable cell. - Layers — the outline tree: a Mesh group (one row per entity block) and a SubModelParts group (the full hierarchy), each row an independently toggleable layer.
- Edit and Mesh Modification — in-place mesh operations and an undoable history (see Mesh Editing & History and MMG Remesh & Level-set).
Drag the divider between the sidebar and the 3D view to resize the sidebar (clamped between 160 and 640 px); the viewport re-fits automatically.
The toolbar (top)
The toolbar sits across the top of the viewport (visible in the screenshot above):
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Reset | Frame all visible geometry (reset the camera). |
| Pan | Toggle click-drag panning of the camera. |
| Cut Plane | Toggle an interactive clipping plane (X / Y / Z, flip, position slider). |
| Wireframe | Toggle wireframe rendering of all layers. |
| Node IDs | Overlay node-id labels (capped at 1 000 nodes). |
| Quality | Open the mesh-quality panel. |
| Field | Open the field-visualization panel. |
| Grid | Toggle a labeled bounding-box grid. |
| Find | Find an entity by ID. |
| 📷 | Save the current viewport as a PNG. |
| Theme | Scene theme: Auto / Dark / Light / Scientific. |
The File menu
The File dropdown (top-left of the viewport) mirrors the kratos.mesh.* palette commands:
- Open… — open another mesh file in the matching preview.
- Save — re-serialize the (possibly edited) mesh back to its source format and overwrite the file (with a one-time overwrite warning).
- Save As… — write to a new file in the source format.
- Export ▸ — write the mesh to a different format, grouped by family: Kratos (
.mdpa), VTK (.vtk,.vtu,.vtp,.xdmf), Surface (.stl,.obj,.ply,.off,.wkt) and Solvers (.msh,.mesh,.inp,.bdf,.unv,.vol,.su2,.dat, and more via meshio++). - Save problem… — bundle the whole setup into one portable zip: the original mesh file, the applied edit operations as a recipe, the problemtype case state (
<name>.kratoscase.json) and the generated case files (ProjectParameters.json, the materials JSON,MainKratos.py,<name>_case.mdpa) — whichever exist. - Load problem… — extract such an archive into a folder of your choice; the mesh opens in the preview, the bundled edits are replayed automatically and the case setup is restored.
Everything you do in the Edit / Mesh Modification sections is what Save and Export write — the edited mesh, not the original file text.
The 3D viewport (right)
The rendered scene, with the always-on orientation cube and navigation controls in the corners. For time-series files a timeline bar appears along the bottom.