Imprinting Bodies

The imprint operation is carried out between two or more bodies that are overlapping or have coincident faces.

This operation pastes the lines and curves from each body onto the faces where the two bodies meet or intersect. When you perform an imprint operation, the affected faces are not deleted or merged, but the face is split where the new lines and curves are added to each face.

This operation allows you to manipulate a face for further sketching operations, or to automate the creation of contact data before importing the model into a simulation. If the faces are coincident, imprinting also generates part contact data. Simcenter STAR-CCM+ uses part contact data to create interfaces between regions.

Requirements

There are two types of imprinting in 3D-CAD: precise imprinting, and tolerant imprinting.

For precise imprinting, the following criteria must be satisfied:

The bodies must overlap by less than 1.0E-8 m, or have coincident faces.
A minimum of two bodies are required for imprinting.

If the selected bodies do not meet the criteria that are mentioned above, the surface of each body remains unchanged after the operation, but an Imprint feature node is still added to the feature tree. If bodies are not in contact, use the transform operation to move the bodies so that they overlap or make contact between faces.

Imprint Bodies Panel

The Imprint Bodies panel options are listed below.


Imprint Option	Specifies whether to imprint all the selected bodies together or whether to imprint two groups of bodies together.
	Within group of bodies	Imprints all selected bodies together.
	Between two groups of bodies	Imprints the bodies in the first group with the bodies in the second group.
Target Bodies	Specifies the target bodies. To change the selections, click in this group box and select the desired bodies from the 3D-CAD View scene or from the Bodies node in the 3D-CAD feature tree.
Tool Bodies	Specifies the tool bodies. To change the selections, click in this group box and select the desired bodies from the 3D-CAD View scene or from the Bodies node in the 3D-CAD feature tree.
Imprint onto Tool Bodies	When activated, the target bodies are imprinted onto the tool bodies. Deactivate this option when you only wish to split faces on the target bodies without creating any imprint on the tool bodies. This option is only available when Imprint Option is set to Between two groups of bodies.
Imprint Type	Defines the tolerance method to use in the operation.
	Precise	Uses the default internal model precision of 1.0E-8 m as the tolerance. This tolerance setting requires that faces of separate bodies be within 1.0E-8 m of each other. This option takes a minimum amount of computational time and works well for all coincident faces and surfaces.
	Tolerant Edges	Reduces the model precision by using a higher tolerance value that you provide on all the edges in the model. This option causes any further geometry operations to use the lower precision model.
	Tolerant Faces	Finds the coincident faces within the specified tolerance. This option is well-suited for skewed faces without sacrificing the precision on the rest of the model.
	Tolerant Faces and Edges	Provides a combination of the Tolerant Edges and the Tolerant Faces options. Use this option only if the other options fail.
Use Auto-Matching	When activated, allows the Parasolid function to automatically identify matched regions (areas of near coincidence) between the target and tool bodies. When deactivated, Simcenter STAR-CCM+ identifies the matched regions and passes them to the Parasolid function. Deactivate the option only if the operation continues to fail after you have tried different tolerance configurations.
Tolerance	Specifies the tolerance for the operation when you set Imprint Type to a tolerance. You are advised to increase the tolerance incrementally from 1.0E-8 m (which is the precise tolerance) to 1.0E-7, 1.0E-6, 1.0E-5 until successful. Only increase the tolerance further if the neighboring feature dimensions are much larger. A very large tolerance value may cause small features to collapse internally and make the model invalid.