I am asking to find out if anyone knows how to setup a gui visual record of contact points between two objects. Attached, is a simulation done using Motion Works when it was a SW add-in. I'm not so concerned with the reaction force vectors as I am with the contact mapping/tracing.
Thanks
Thank you Ian,
Small spheres or dots at the contact locations would be sufficient. It would be nice to see something similiar to this implemented in a future release. As an end user I have zero experience writting API macros so until a stock macro/feature is made available I will assume this is not possible with the current version.
There is an API event that gets fired currently when two parts collide. The information you can get from this is the time at which the collision occurs. But there is no direct information about the location of the point of contact. You may be able to query the part's position at that time and somehow figure out the point of contact. I'll let you know if I can find more about this.
Thanks,
Shrikant
Hi Chuck,
That's an interesting animation. I know that the contact locations are generated by the solver, but I don't know in the current API if they are exposed, but if they are, it would be possible to write a little macro to generate little spheres at the points of contact. Plotting the points is actually the best way to track contact as is it incredibly complex to create meaningful trace curves from contact results when there are multiple points of contact between bodies).
Shrikant may have better insight into this, but I will take a look to see if the API has the information available.
Cheers,
Ian