Morphing Concepts

Domains and Handles

The mesh is divided into domains and all nodes/elements inside a domain can change their location during morphing. At the corner of each domain handles are placed on a grid node. By moving the handles, the nodes and elements of the corresponding domain are moved in a smooth manner.

One advantage of this morphing concept is that parametric changes can be performed easily and in a precise manner, for example increasing the radius of a pipe.

Figure 1.

Morph Volumes

The mesh is surrounded by morph volumes, which are deformable cuboids. All the elements/nodes inside a morph volume can change their location during a morphing step. The morph volumes can be split, combined and easily adapted to the shape of the numerical model. Between two adjacent morph volumes a tangency can be defined, which has a strong impact on the morphed mesh between those two morph volumes.

By default, handles are defined at the corner of the cuboids. By moving the handles, all the nodes and elements in the corresponding morph volumes are moved in a smooth manner.

The morph volume concept is quick, intuitive and very well suited for generating smooth shape changes for complex models.

Figure 2.