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Dark background for easier localization of small entities

Submitted by Perbear on May 31, 2014 - 09:43

I have trouble locating small entities like slivers when I debug my mesh.

Perhaps it would be easer to see a small bright spot on a dark background?

Now I struggle seeing small dark faces or lines on white background when I try to pinpoint what is making trouble in my mesh.

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Change View color

Submitted by symscape on May 31, 2014 - 10:42.

You can change the background color according to:

  1. Select the background (sim).
  2. In the Properties Panel click the View tab - 2nd from the left.
  3. Select and edit the Color property.

Then select all edges and change their color.

The only reliable way I'm aware of to locate slivers in Caedium is to:

  1. Assign Scalar Fields->E Ratio to all your faces and make sure Shade = Flat and Transparent = True to see individual elements. The mesh elements on slivers tend to be highly stretched to conform to the sliver topology and therefore low quality.
  2. Make all your edges transparent to avoid them obscuring the sliver faces.
  3. In the Color Map legend use the right-hand threshold slider to narrow your range to the worst elements, i.e., close to the low value.
  4. Click Home->Fit All to narrow the view to those low value elements.

Is there no way to avoid slivers in your CAD construction process, or at least detect them within your CAD system? For instance, how does embedded stress analysis software deal with slivers?

I notice some slivers are created because CAD users try to make modifications by eye rather than pre-selecting CAD entities. Other slivers are created when CAD users create very small fillets that will have minimal effect on flow characteristics and are therefore best avoided.

Avoiding slivers

Submitted by Perbear on May 31, 2014 - 15:07.

Problems is a result of double curved surfaces. Quite important when designing a superlow drag velomobile! ;-)

When joining the formed surfaces typically corners in 'needles' or 'spikes', resulting in slivers when imported via STEP.

To make STEP I need to first make solid model. To get a solid from surface model (simple CAD modeling using extrusion and cutout of basic geometry shapes do not work well when modelling superlow drag surfaces) the surface must be complete and stitched, i.e. all edges must be joined with one and only one other edge.

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