PreView is a Finite Element (FE) preprocessor that has been designed specifically to set up FE problems for FEBio. It allows the user to create or import meshes, specify the boundary conditions and material properties, and set the analysis options, all in a user-friendly graphical environment.
PreView offers the user the ability to create simple geometry literally by the click of a mouse button. Simple primitives such as boxes, cylinders, spheres, and more can be created quickly. Several mesh editing tools are available and can be used to modify the geometry. For instance, PreView has several mesh repair tools that can be used to fix common problems. Tetrahedral meshes can be generated from surface meshes via TetGen. More complicated meshes can be imported from several different file formats (e.g., Abaqus, LSDYNA, Nike3D, Amira Hypermesh, STL, etc.).
The time steps from the FEBio output (.plt file) can be viewed as an animation in PostView
PreView offers several tools to set up the boundary conditions. Time varying nodal displacements, nodal forces, pressure forces, rigid body kinematics can all be set up in a user-friendly way. More complex boundary conditions such as rigid interfaces and contact interfaces for can be defined easily.
Materials can be defined using the Material Editor, which offers a convenient overview of the available materials and their properties. PreView supports nearly all of the material models available in FEBio, including isotropic hyperelastic (e.g. Mooney-Rivlin, Veronda Westmann), transversely isotropic, poro-elastic, rigid body, and more. PreView also offers tools for setting up the solutes and solid-bound molecules in a multiphasic analysis, and to define chemical reactions.
After the user has defined the FE problem, the entire model can be exported to a few different file formats, such as FEBio or Nike3D. The user can also run the model in FEBio directly from within PreView.