Mesh vertices numbering on export // Making selections for PostProcessing easier

[harald_goetz]

I really have a Problem with Moldflow, and I´m not alone!

I have seen Jim McGuire presentation

Net Shape Injection Molding: Warpage Prediction-Based Mold Correction

There you can see, he has some problems with selection of nodes and some wishes.

I´ve seen similar things by another user in germany who has helped himself by exporting the (Patran) Mesh and do the selections outside moldflow or at least by a linked (selfwritten) tool.

So I´m thinking about doing myself the same, or get someone else to do this job.

What I found out so far:

- If you have a DD Mesh and make later a 3D mesh, your external vertices (="Nodes" in Moldflow) keep the same no.

That even worked for me when meshing with external source and importing nas or bdf mesh (DD)

What I would like to do:

Selections can be done in nearly every other 3D tool better than in Moldflow.
One reason (I asked Franco Costa and Hanno Raalte in 2013) is, that the vertex doesn´t know about the edge (we see itb but MF internally not, right?).

So I exported a small Abaqus mesh, use a free tool that exports *.inp (3d) to *.ply (Stanford format) and read it into Blender.

There I could do every selection I want, like shortest path etc. and throw out the vertex(Nodes no. by a script.

This seems tedious, but the best way for complicated selections (better would be Moldflow internal, but that would mean a "ghost" mesh overhead).

What else could help a lot here?

My wish / suggestion: Make an export as *.ply from Moldflow for surface (DD) and 3D meshes availabe. Whether as script or as dialog. But it has to keep the same Node no.!

I´ve tried FBX, but it seems the Node-no. are scrambled (new sorted), could also be that Blender does something wrong, but I don´t think so.

So any takers? Any comments from the MF meshing engineers?

Everything is welcome.

Regards

Harald

[harald_goetz]

MF Team has made a "case" out of it, - would have given KUDOS if the answer would be here!
Thankyou for listening.
Harald