Reviewing Part Contacts

Part contacts are created whenever you imprint parts or part surfaces, when you import CAD parts that have contacting surfaces, or when you create them manually. The surface repair tool allows you to review part contacts based on a series of metrics in order to identify potential sources of error.

By using these metrics you can verify expected contact paths throughout the geometry and also identify potential problems within the contact definitions. A full description of these metrics and the problems that they identify is provided in Metrics for Review Imprint Mode.
  1. To use the Merge/Imprint tool in Review Imprint mode, first specify whether you want to use all the active repair parts or specific input parts.
    1. If you want to review all the active parts, select the Use all Parts option.
    2. If you want to review specific parts, select the Specify input parts option and proceed to select two or more parts.

The part contact review tool provides you with seven metrics that help you to analyse part contacts.

  1. From the Metric menu, choose one of the following metrics:
    • Part Contact Summary
    • Contacting Parts Count
    • Part Contact Area Ratio
    • Contact Area Mismatch
    • Non-Contiguous Contact
    • Non-Contacting Islands
    • Contact Topology Errors

      For more information on each metric, see Metrics for Review Imprint Mode.

  2. To calculate the metric, click Calculate Metrics.
    The status of the metric calculation is represented by the icon next to the Calculate Metrics option, which has four states:
    • - Metric calculation in progress
    • - Results up to date
    • - Calculation error
    • - Results out of date
      The following actions cause metric results to go out of date:
      • Modifying the mesh geometry or topology
      • Changing the input parts
    After the calculation, the table is populated with results.

    Each metric provides its own set of column headers. The results from each metric are stored in memory, so you can switch between different metrics and view results without recalculating the metric data.

  3. Sort the data according to the most relevant column header for the problem you want to analyze.
    For example, if you chose the metric, Part Contact Summary, then you can sort the Face Count in descending order and identify any contacts that have an unexpectedly high number of faces. For suggestions on how to sort the data, see Metrics for Review Imprint Mode.
  4. In the table select a row to view the selected entity in the scene or use the keys to cycle through the results.
    When you select a row in the table, a selection action is automatically performed in the scene corresponding to the optimal default result for the current metric. A list of the default selection behavior for each contact is provided below:
    Metric Default Selection Behavior
    Part Contact Summary Selects all contacting faces for the part contact
    Contacting Parts Count Selects the base part and all parts contacting the base part
    Part Contact Area Ratio Selects part contact faces for the base part
    Contact Area Mismatch Selects the faces for the part surface contact
    Non-Contiguous Contact Selects the faces for the part surface contact
    Non-Contacting Islands Selects the faces for the part surface contact
    Contact Topology Errors Selects the faces and edges corresponding to the topology errors for each part surface contact

    If you want to use a different selection behavior, use the Row selection behavior options to change the resultant scene selection. For more information on these options, see Review Imprint Mode Options.

  5. To look at a specific contact or components within the contact, or to select components within the contact, right-click the row in the table and choose from the options that appear.


  6. Once you have identified a problem related to the part contacts, you can use the tools in Surface Repair to fix them.