By the change towards independantly meshed components the mapping of the connections of components as for example welding points, weldseams or bonds in the process of simulation is getting more and more important. So far components connected with each other had to be modelled such that nodes at common edges were identical creating a big effort in meshing and tuning variants of components, but now flanges are modelled enabling the binding of components by connection-objects.
With crashViewer such connections as welding points cannot only be visualized but modified. This means the calculating engineer is able set new welding points in the CAD-database to connect two components at an early stage of development. Since welding point connections can only be defined at points where two components are lying respectively close together crashViewer supports the process by blending out such regions being to distant.
An important aid to do this is distance visualisation. Mapping the minimal node-element-distances to texture coordinates in a onedimensional RGBA-texture and making use of a suitable transferfunction the MODULATE-texture-environment allows together with a corresponding alpha test to blend out the geometry where there is no further geometry of other components nearby.
The first picture shows part of the rear part of the vehicle where each finite element mesh is colored individually. In the second picture the minimal node-element-distance is visualized, the color red represents flange distances. The third picture finally shows only the geometry of flanges.
Using this technique no new geometry is calculated, only the
ability of the texture hardware is utilized.