Building Compound Meshes

Compound Mesh is a combination of several mesh objects (meshes, groups, submeshes). All elements and groups present in input meshes are present in the compound mesh. However, it does not use geometry or hypotheses of the initial mesh objects. The links between the input meshes and the compound mesh are not supported, consequently the modification of an input mesh does not lead to the update of the compound mesh.

There are two modes of building a compound:

  • joining selected mesh objects into a new mesh.

  • appending selected mesh objects to an existing mesh.

To Build a compound mesh:

From the Mesh menu select Build Compound or click “Build Compound Mesh” button img in the toolbar. The following dialog box will appear:

_images/buildcompound.png
  • Result group allows selecting a mode of operation

    • Activating Create new mesh named enables typing the name of the resulting compound mesh.

    • Activating Append to mesh enables selection of a mesh to append other selected objects to.

  • Meshes, sub-meshes, groups allows selecting the meshes, sub-meshes and groups to be concatenated. They can be chosen in the Object Browser while holding Ctrl button.

  • Processing identical groups allows selecting the method of processing the namesake groups existing in the input meshes. They can be either

    • United - all elements of Group1 of Mesh_1 and Group1 of Mesh_2 become the elements of Group1 of the Compound_Mesh, or

    • Renamed - Group1 of Mesh_1 becomes Group1_1 and Group1 of Mesh_2 becomes Group1_2.

    See Grouping elements for more information about groups.

  • Create groups from input objects check-box permits to automatically create groups corresponding to every initial mesh.

    _images/buildcompound_groups.png

    Groups created from input meshes ‘Box_large’ and ‘Box_small’

  • You can choose to additionally Merge coincident nodes and elements in the compound mesh, in which case it is possible to define the Tolerance for this operation.

    _images/image160.gif

    Example of a compound of two meshed cubes

See Also a sample script of Building a compound of meshes.