Hi Danny, I'm not really familiar with UDM format, it seems to be a proprietary Moldflow format, and I'm not sure if there is any documentation available to describe it.

But I think it is not unusual for Finite Element Analysis programs to use a different kind of mesh structure where each mesh element is a little solid tetrahedron rather than a triangular surface facet.

So it is possible for there to be a different kind of mesh used for that kind of thing, I'm not sure if that is the case for your particular file or not though.

- Michael

http://www.geomagic.com/en/
Not sure if it's finite elements technic :)

Hi Michael,

> So it is possible for there to be a different kind
> of mesh used for that kind of thing, I'm not
> sure if that is the case for your particular file or not though.

Yes we can use tetrahedron meshes, but that is for more detailed 3d analysis, the file I've attached is just a shell model or what Moldflow call Duel Domain, where the model is just like STL or .obj.

The mesh control is not that good it could take up to 30min sometimes to mesh a product and then there is the aspect ratio to contend with, where you try and get the ratio down to 6 or better for each element for a more accurate result. It's not unusual to manually correct the aspect ratio of 50+ elements.
I'll see what other formats it can handle, I'm trying to see if I can use MoI's brilliant meshing engine to help us out.

@ Pilou, thanks for the link, looks interesting.

Cheers

Hi Danny, yeah STL or OBJ are some of the most common polygon file formats so hopefully it would support one of those. I'd think it would support STL at least since that is the single most common polygon format involved with manufacturing.

You'll probably want to use the "Divide larger than" setting when producing the mesh so that more evenly sized polygons are created, like this:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2833.5

- Michael