Hello everyone.
My name is Keely and I am a research scientist with the GeoStudio group here at Seequent.
Today I thought I’d share with you some of our favourite tips and tricks.
Hopefully at least one of these 10 tips will be new to you
and improve your experience and workflow in GeoStudio.
So let’s get right into it.
The first tip has to do with the right-click context menu.
At any time that you are working in the GeoStudio project explorer window,
you do not have to go to the Define Project window to add geometry or child analyses,
delete or rename an analysis or geometry branch,
or queue an analysis for solving in the Solve Manager.
When sketching your geometry in 2D,
you can use your keyboard to activate many CAD-like drawing tools.
For example, while in the Draw Region mode,
I can use CTRL+R on my keyboard,
which activates the CAD drawing tool in the bottom toolbar.
Here, the absolute x,y coordinate can be entered.
Alternatively, I could have entered a relative offset,
relative length and angle, relative x or y offset and angle,
or geometry point ID.
While drawing, the SHIFT key can be held down to limit movement in the horizontal or vertical direction.
The CTRL button can be held down to snap to an existing geometry line
to ensure that a tight fit exists between regions.
Lastly, “C” on my keyboard will close the region or exit the drawing mode.
GeoStudio has the ability to copy and paste materials and functions.
If you want to include some of the same materials from a previous file created for the same site,
you can copy and paste the materials from the previous file
directly into your new GeoStudio project.
Take this file as an example.
I can drag a box over the materials or hold down the CTRL button
and click on the desired materials in the list from the old file.
I can right click in the list box and choose Copy.
Now when I open the Define Materials window in my new GeoStudio file,
I can right click in the list box and choose Paste.
All materials, including their defined parameters and functions,
will be copied over to the new file.
Boundary functions and climate functions for the land-climate boundary condition
can also be copied from other GeoStudio files in a similar manner.
While working with parameters and graphs in GeoStudio,
you can modify the visible units on your screen by right-clicking in either the parameter edit box
or in the graphing window.
For example, I can change my pore-water pressure units in this hydraulic conductivity function
from kilopascals to pounds per square foot.
Alternatively, I can change the hydraulic conductivity
from meters per second to feet per second.
The data fields automatically convert to the new unit.
While in the Draw Materials menu,
you can apply the same material to a region in multiple analyses
and geometry by activating the Apply to Multiple Analyses toggle.
This opens up a list box for you to choose which analyses and geometries
you would like the material to be applied to.
The same action can be used in the Draw Boundary Conditions window.
The finite element mesh in GeoStudio is automatically created when you add a material to a geometry.
You can drag a box over the geometry objects
or hold down your CTRL button on your keyboard to click on individual objects
to highlight them in the Draw Mesh Properties window.
If you want to modify the mesh properties of just a line, point, or region,
you can change the dropdown menu here.
This allows you to modify the element size, element type,
or add mesh constraints to your finite element mesh in 2D.
The Remove Constraints button can be used to remove all constraints from the finite element mesh,
returning to the default mesh using the defined global element length.
If at any time, your analysis stops solving in the middle of the defined duration,
you can toggle off all other analyses
and choose “Solve from Last Time Step” from the dropdown menu on the Start button.
This will allow the solver to start solving from the last saved time step in the file.
If you have a large file, or multiple files that you are solving,
there is also the option to solve from the Command Prompt window.
GeoCMD can be used to automate the solving, upgrading, and report generation
for many project files sequentially.
In Command Prompt, you would ensure that your PATH environment variable
includes the folder where GeoStudio exists.
Then you would type in GeoCMD.exe with the file name and location and the analysis name.
For more information on the GeoCMD executable, please refer to the tutorial video on our YouTube Channel.
In order to review and interpret your results,
you will likely need to create multiple graphs in Draw Graph.
While working in 2D, the custom graph locations can be used to specify locations
on the model domain that are not geometry objects.
This could be used to choose a specific node or element in the mesh,
holding down the mouse button and dragging a box allows you to choose a number of nodes or elements,
or holding down the SHIFT key on your keyboard allows you to highlight nodes along a specified line.
As a final tip, I thought I’d share with you my three favourite hot keys in GeoStudio.
The first one is CTRL+Z, as this can be used to undo the last action you made in GeoStudio,
whether it was drawing a line, deleting a data point in a function, and so on.
The next one is F1.
The F1 button on your keyboard will open the GeoStudio Help topic
for any window that you have open.
For example, if I have the Draw Graph window open and I hit F1,
the Draw Graph help topic is opened in the GeoStudo Help.
Lastly, if at any time, you are missing a window,
such as the Solve Manager disappearing,
you can use ALT+W+E to reset your GeoStudio windows to the default layout.
This will not modify your analysis or results, but will simply return all windows in the GeoStudio user-interface
to the default view.
I have now shared with you ten of our favourite tips and trick for using GeoStudio.
I hope you have found these helpful in your GeoStudio experience and workflow.
Thank you for watching.