I agree it's tedious. It'll need a redesign at some stage. In the mean time, there's another workflow that might be a little easier, mainly because it doesn't require any renaming.
1) Right click a surface in the CAD geometry 2) Loads & Constraints -> New bonded contact 3) OK - at this point both master and slave are the same so next change one of them - 4) Select the other surface 5) Double click the bonded contact in the outline tree 6) Change either master or slave from <1 geometry surface> to <1 selected geometry surface> using the dropdown list. 7) OK
Victor, is it possible to have bonded contact or something similar like "New Tied Contact (CCX Only)" to connect surfaces together (translation and rotation like bonded contact in Linear Static Analysis) for the nonlinear analysis running CCX? The reason for the request is because of using CCX contact feature which is only available for nonlinear analysis.
You can still use bonded contact in nonlinear with CCX but: - It's not available in the menu so you need to switch to Static 3D then back again. - It becomes *TIE in CCX, which requires the surfaces to be very close together, unlike Mecway's bonded contact which allows gaps between them. That difference is the reason it's disabled.
Victor, can we have an option to show or hide the cursors on the legend? I know they were requested but don't use those often and been ask several time why my plots have those cursors and lines pulling up and down (when I set my user defined max and min limits). Thanks
Hi, I make the same, use an external program to take screenshots. Maybe could be implemented in Mecway a similar feature, a keyboard shortcut to use the actual save as PNG feature, thus there is no needed to implement the removal of the cursor and the three selection icons (node/surface/element). Best thing would be a way to specify where this screenshots should be saved by default, being the actual lml folder a good starting path (normally I has to recover from the screenshoot folder to the analysis folder... every time!)
I understand about the cursors. It's going to be a tricky decision. More options means more time wasted understanding all the options, and more risk of problems from setting them badly by accident. Hopefully I can find a nice way to do it, perhaps incorporating other screen-capture features people have asked for.
Alt+E+C copies the graphics to the clipboard without the cursors or node/face/element selection buttons.
I have posted that in another thread but also re-post it here as a feature request, so, is there any chance in near future for an additional option for displaying in MECWAY results, the element stress at Gauss points? I think this will be a very useful information regarding evaluating the magnitude of any local/nodal stress but also the quality of mesh. Thanks!
Sorry I forgot to respond to that. Probably not unless there's a very important need that can't be done another way. I'd like to add some element quality metrics which might use Gauss point stresses though. For now, you can get some idea of stress error by looking at the discontinuities in element stresses.
Nice option, I have seen something similar with Hypermesh from Altair. They have the same limitations (no sharp edges are recognized/represented) in the mesh. On the other side, in order to have a good representation of small features small element must be used, but there is no automatic (at least what I have seen in the examples) growing of that across flat features, so meshes becomes very bigs.
Guess that after seeing several of this tools, in my humild opinion there is nothing like the old hand made hexameshing. In this way one can manage every aspect of the mesh, put the exact element quantity and quality where is really needed (hey, you must have an idea where the stress will be concentrated... a software can't do that automaticly), choose what features/edges will be represented on the mesh. As I have recognized by my own mistakes, all the time "wasted" in good meshing is recovered in less time to solve (form hours to minuts or days to hours, or just solve to don't solve just by the mesh quality or size) and better results.
I recognize that a good mesh aplication is very expensive, training also, and take years become productive in this especialized work, there is no magic solution.
Normally this kind of meshes are oriented to complex analysis (hyperelastic materials, plasticity, crash, self contact, big deformations...), not for the everyday lineal analysis, so it worth to take a little of time to make a good mesh.
Also attached is a screenshot of a rough mesh that show the element edges going through the surfaces getting congested. I think someone mentioned about this before but not sure.
That's odd VMH. 150% works alright for me. I'll have to study up on this to find out why it's not consistent. Can you show me the dialog box with the scaling settings? Also, what version of Windows is it?
For the mesh lines showing through the faces, in v4, you can use Labs -> Line Z-offset and set it to zero. Then the lines will get partly buried behind the surfaces but at least they shouldn't overcrowd everything. I'm still trying to find a better solution.
Hi, good option the Line Z-offset, my meshes looks bad also when they have too much elements and the zoom level was too high. I though that was a problem of my old hardware :-)
I have noted that if is adjusted to zero we lost the element edges, so a smaller value removes the extra lines on the nodes but keeps the edges, but this value is different for every model. Thus, can be this value saved with the file?
The Line Z-offset works well (see attachments before and after). It's be great if this can be done automatically. Doesn't seem like the value can be saved before I tried and didn't work.
Victor, I check about 10 different model with varying thickness (0.25" up to 2.5"), a value of 0.0001 seems to work perfectly for the Line Z-offset. I opened and closed all of them and check each time, the default value seems to be 0.0005. If we can have an option to save a user-defined value for it just like other options like out of range color, number of bands, etc., that may be it.
Comments
1) Right click a surface in the CAD geometry
2) Loads & Constraints -> New bonded contact
3) OK
- at this point both master and slave are the same so next change one of them -
4) Select the other surface
5) Double click the bonded contact in the outline tree
6) Change either master or slave from <1 geometry surface> to <1 selected geometry surface> using the dropdown list.
7) OK
Thanks and looking forward to the next release!
- It's not available in the menu so you need to switch to Static 3D then back again.
- It becomes *TIE in CCX, which requires the surfaces to be very close together, unlike Mecway's bonded contact which allows gaps between them. That difference is the reason it's disabled.
save as->PNG images, the cursors are not shown in the saved image
Regards.
Alt+E+C copies the graphics to the clipboard without the cursors or node/face/element selection buttons.
I have posted that in another thread but also re-post it here as a feature request, so, is there any chance in near future for an additional option for displaying in MECWAY results, the element stress at Gauss points? I think this will be a very useful information regarding evaluating the magnitude of any local/nodal stress but also the quality of mesh. Thanks!
Is a toolkit for mesh verification. Regards
Looks like a very nice automatic hex mesher.
Guess that after seeing several of this tools, in my humild opinion there is nothing like the old hand made hexameshing. In this way one can manage every aspect of the mesh, put the exact element quantity and quality where is really needed (hey, you must have an idea where the stress will be concentrated... a software can't do that automaticly), choose what features/edges will be represented on the mesh. As I have recognized by my own mistakes, all the time "wasted" in good meshing is recovered in less time to solve (form hours to minuts or days to hours, or just solve to don't solve just by the mesh quality or size) and better results.
I recognize that a good mesh aplication is very expensive, training also, and take years become productive in this especialized work, there is no magic solution.
Normally this kind of meshes are oriented to complex analysis (hyperelastic materials, plasticity, crash, self contact, big deformations...), not for the everyday lineal analysis, so it worth to take a little of time to make a good mesh.
Regards
Also attached is a screenshot of a rough mesh that show the element edges going through the surfaces getting congested. I think someone mentioned about this before but not sure.
For the mesh lines showing through the faces, in v4, you can use Labs -> Line Z-offset and set it to zero. Then the lines will get partly buried behind the surfaces but at least they shouldn't overcrowd everything. I'm still trying to find a better solution.
I have noted that if is adjusted to zero we lost the element edges, so a smaller value removes the extra lines on the nodes but keeps the edges, but this value is different for every model. Thus, can be this value saved with the file?
Regards
This thread's starting to cover quite a lot of varied things and could get hard to follow so please bring up any new issues in their own thread.