ADAMS/PostProcessor  

HTML report export

ADAMS/PostProcessor now provides the ability to output your simulation results as an HTML Report. You can output animations, plots, and model information. This new option can be found on the File -> Export menu.

Support for MPG movie format

The record option now provides support for the MPG movie format. This format is supported on all platforms making it possible to output movies of your ADAMS/PostProcessor animations on UNIX as well as Windows platforms.

Trailing frames

A feature has been added to the animation playback in ADAMS/PostProcessor to allow trailing frames to be displayed. With this feature a specified number of previously displayed frames continue to be displayed. A decay rate slider allows you to specify the rate the older images fade away. This feature can be used to better visualize the motion of a model or to add a sense of motion to still images of the animation. This new option is found on the Animation dashboard.

Color panel

The new Color Picker described in What’s New for ADAMS/View is also available in ADAMS/PostProcessor.

Flexible body performance improvements

Changes have been made in the handling of flexible bodies that lead to faster caching in preparation for animation. This is in addition to the solver performance improvements for flexible bodies as discussed in What’s New for ADAMS/Solver.

Plotting performance improvements

For the 2003 release some significant performance improvements have been made when plotting large results sets. Although actual performance improvements vary depending on the operating system platform and the size of results set being plotted, speed increase as high as five times the speed in ADAMS/PostProcessor version 12.0 has been noted in some situations. The improvements are most evident when plotting curves created from very large DAC files (80,000 to 250,000 data points) on Windows.

Contour plots

For the 2003 release contour plots have been extended to rigid bodies. This functionality will primarily be of interest to those of you that use the quasi-static stress recovery functionality in ADAMS/Durability. See What’s New for ADAMS/Durability for more details.

When contour plots are used with rigid bodies, they behave very similar to contour plots for flexible bodies. A contour plot legend is included in the view, with pre-calculated and settable minimum and maximum values. Any changes to these values cause the colors contours on all bodies, both rigid and flex, in the particular view to be recalculated. Additional options for controlling the number of decimal places, the range for scientific notation, and the presence of trailing zeros on the legend scale were also added for both rigid and flexible contour plots.

Vector plots

ADAMS/PostProcessor now provides the ability to display vector plots of modal force or modal torque information on flexible bodies. A vector plot consists of a force vector attached to each node of a flex body. You have the ability to control the vector plot visibility on a view by view basis. The vector plots are controlled through the Vector Plot tab in ADAMS/PostProcessor. If your model contains a flexible body with a modal load, two additional options (MFORCE FORCE and MFORCE TORQUE) appear on the Vector Plot Type pull-down menu.

Contact enhancements

Many improvements were made to 3D contacts for the 2003 release.

In ADAMS/PostProcessor additional contact incident information is now available for display by double-clicking on the contact name (for example, CONTACT_1) in either the results set or object list. You can now plot the location of the contact point on each body, normal and frictional force vectors, friction coefficient, slip deformation and slip velocity, penetration dept, and velocity.

In addition, if two bodies contact each other in multiple locations, separate contact tracks are now calculated and the incident information for each of these tracks is available for plotting.

See What’s New for ADAMS/Solver and What's New for ADAMS/View for information related to other improvements in 3D contacts.

Support for PNG file format

PNG file format is now supported as an option for output of images using the Animation Record panel. The PNG is an image file format with good compression ratios even with shaded models. It may be useful to you as an alternative to JPG.