First things first. I am oyil. Yes, the one who created and uploaded sketchup models of ROTA rims into 3D Warehouse. I have been a silent sketchup user since version 5. As I am a car freak, even though i dont own one, I pretty much, adore things with connection to cars... which now includes designing my very own using sketchup. I realized i needed several different cad programs to do chassis design for strength, kinematics, aesthetics. But these are all pricey, and the free ones are really hard to learn. Then I discovered http://www.car-stuff.info/fea.htm and continued the idea.
Here's a plugin that lets us use sketchup as a frontend to the free Frame3DD frame analysis software. Basically, you draw edges that represents your frame members,.. attach material properties to the edges,... apply forces to the frame,... then extract the information to a format that is accepted by Frame3dd. The plugin will execute Frame3dd by itself. The results can be plotted using gnuplot for visualization of dynamic characteristics of frame design.
LIMITATIONS:
(1)Currently, the "Apply Material" function only applies material properties of a 1"x1"x2mm steel SHS to the selected frame members.Use mm as units in your model.
(2)"Apply Constraint" function applies rigid constraints. i.e. no movement allowed for the x, y, and z directions
(3)"Apply Force" function can only be applied to nodes.
(4) Amount of members. I havent tried going over 300 frame members. It might be too much for Frame3dd.
I hope to add more of frame3dd's features available in the future, if time permits.
CONFIGURATION:
A config.ini file is needed by the plugin for it to know where to dump the output files for Frame3dd processing.
[3DD_APP]
Path=<path to installed Frame3dd> - ex. c:\Program Files\Frame3dd\
Users will need to download and install:
Frame3dd - Thanks to Dr. Henri Gavin - http://frame3dd.sourceforge.net/
gnuplot - http://www.gnuplot.info/
Link to demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1H7yiFpGvs&feature=youtu.be
[flash=560,315:3o6m928n]http://www.youtube.com/v/u1H7yiFpGvs[/flash:3o6m928n]
NEXT UP: V0.2
features:
(1) show resulting deformation
(2) additional constraint types - these new constraints allow prescribed movements along axis parallel to global
Plugin: Sketchup Frame3dd Interface V0.1