Hypermesh TCL commands to create a node and identify node id created

Altair Forum User

I have hundreds of points that I was thinking I wanted to read in from a csv file to create nodes, and local coordinate systems for each of those nodes, but the end goal is to be able to apply a force at the node locations according to the local coordinate systems that were created.
I read somewhere here, that nodes are not related to the mesh in any way, so Is there a way then to find the nearest node location in the existing mesh closest to the node I create from the csv file?

Also, once a node is created by:  *createnode $X_Pos $Y_Pos $Z_Pos 0 0 0   is there a way to capture the node ID that was created so that it can be referred to when creating the local coord system using *systemcreate3nodes  ?

Altair Forum User

ok, I've gotten to here:

this allows me to identify the node# of the just created node,

 

and actually, I have 3 nodes I am using to create a local coordinate system:

 

but now,  is there a way to create the coordinate system with a name or a way to retrieve the name given to each, as it is now it doesn't look like there is any way to distinguish one from another.

 

Still unknown is what would be the TCL command to select a node or a point on the mesh to apply a force to ?

As far as I can tell, I'd want it to be the node/point on the mesh nearest the above referenced node_id which is the local_coordinate system's origin.

 

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