In this lecture, we will cover the following:

• How to write a function that draws an arrow pointing at the node of maximum displacement,
• How to align the arrow with the direction of the selected displacement component,
• How to combine the new arrow function with our existing widget-driven plotting code,
• How to add a dropdown that switches between perspective and orthographic top, front and side views.

We now extend the visualisation from the previous lecture with two pieces of extra functionality. The first is a function called plot_selected_arrow, which adds an arrow indicating where the maximum displacement occurs for whichever component is currently being shown.

The second piece of functionality is the ability to switch between view types. We create a new version of our plot function called plot_deflection_multi_view, which takes an additional view argument. Inside the function, we define a small dictionary of camera presets, one for the default perspective view and three for orthographic top, front and side views.

To expose this in the UI, we add a fourth widget, a dropdown listing the four view options, and wire it into the same render function as our existing controls. The result is a much more polished and inspectable plot, where you can switch components, scale the deflections, see exactly where the peak occurs, and inspect the structure from any standard viewpoint.

Next up

In the next and final lecture of this section, we will tidy everything up by refactoring our notebook and moving the bulk of our utility functions into the utils file, so the analysis notebook itself stays nice and lean.