Currently, the surface contacts feature can be really frustrating to deal with.
Here are a number of issues / suggestions that would make it much more manageable and increase productivity significantly:
- Highlight surface contacts when a part is selected. Being able to quickly identify how many / which surface contacts are present for a specific part would make it very easy to confirm that all the contacts are actually there. Similarly, if you select two parts at once, those contacts which are between both parts should highlight. Maybe there could be an enable feature in a preferences menu so that this can be disabled for people that don't want it.
- Improve speed of multi-contact select. There seems to be a glitch where trying to select multiple contacts at once is an exponential function where it takes increasingly longer times for each additional contact you want to select at once. Where selecting 2-3 contacts at once takes fractions of a second, trying to select 10-20 contact at once can takes more than a minute.
- Don't generate contacts for parts excluded from the analysis. It doesn't seem like it makes sense to generate contacts for parts that aren't going to be included in the analysis. This just adds to the auto generation time and clutters the surface contact area. I always end up suppressing them (I'm not sure if you need to) so that adds a significant amount of time.
- Automatically suppress contacts for parts excluded from analysis. It's really difficult to sort through contacts when most of them exist for parts that have already been excluded from the analysis. By suppressing or deleting these contacts when you exclude a part automatically, you'd save a lot of work.
- Allow automatically generated contact deletion through the right-click menu. You can delete them one at a time by dragging them from the side explorer to the main viewscreen, so why not just allow them to be deleted through the menu. This would allow multiple to be deleted at once.
- Fix bugs with viewing contacts. Not sure if this is just my system or not, but there are times when I select the contact to view the contact faces that they don't highlight. This seems to happen consistently after trying to rename a contact, and getting it to highlight again is difficult (I think I get it working again by editing a contact then renaming, but this isn't consistent). It should be easy and consistent that when you select a contact from the explorer menu, the surfaces that are in contact highlight.
By making these relatively small improvements, doing FEA on large assemblies would become significantly more efficient.
