Difficulties with Setup of basic crashscenario due to UI discrepancies btw. Tutorials/Versions

Hello everyone,

Quick intro for context:

im trying to get into Crashsimulations for a project in Graduate Class which involves cost optimization of a given door structure of a convertible. The door structure is completely made of deepdrawing-pressed steels; our main approach consists of substituting the crash-relevant parts steel grades with the next lower grade and compensating mainly with increasing material thicknesses.

Im mentioning this since this lends itself to a quick workflow: Make use of constant material thicknesses, 2D-Mesh the part, pick out a couple of lower grade steels of the same family, assign them to the Mesh, assign roughly compensating materialthickness-increases, yank a pole at the "BC'd" part (e.g. a crash beam) and check for equal or better deformation performances.

My problem has been setting up this rather simple scenario due to most tutorials or documentations which show how to navigate the User Interface not corresponding with what I would find on my actual Hypermesh 2025 or Hypercrash 2023.1 installations, or any older ones you would have access to. I have tried with the 2023.1 or 2022.3 versions to no avail, most if not all tutorials you find on Youtube show older versions with wildly differing interfaces at different steps of the setup process.

My main gripe has been setting up a Type 7 contact. For now I want to stay with Hypermesh 2025, so my screenshots will be from that version only; let me recount my workflow up to that point: (based on these turorials: No. 1 for setting up Material, Properties an Contact:

No. 2 for trying to somehow find parallels in the new Hypermesh interface, since here we have a bullet striking a surface which is close to what I am trying to set up.

I start in CAD, taking, e.g., a crash beam. The intention is to assign a velocity to the soon to be added object which is directed at the crash beam. I then import that STEP-file to Hypermesh2025 and apply mesh to the beams midsurface and delete the remaining geometry to get rid of the 3D-geometry of the beam.

I then create a DP600-material from Tutorial No. 1 (as it happens to closely match with the original parts steel grade) and a matching properties-feature, also mirroring whats happening in the tutorial.

After that I go to create a contact with a TYPE7-Card Image. HERE lies the main problem: In the tutorial, the person continues to select the crashbox-component as the Slaved component. At my end, I cant even choose any components, it asks for sets, and ONLY sets:

Ive tried creating sets by searching for "sets" in the toolbars search-function:

And just tried with selecting the mesh elements of the crash beam. This hasnt helped, I cant really choose these sets, I dont know if my approach makes any sense at this point, as I am also trying to add a projectile/wall which is supposed to impact the crash beam later. This is not the only instance of UI simply differing from what modern Hypermesh displays.

The tutorial continues with the creation of a new rigid body component, and this is the moment where the UI differs again; I can not follow up with the same steps in HM25.

The tutorial continues with the rest of the setup which in turn mostly resembles the modern UI.

My question is how I am supposed to go at it; is my approach correct in the first place? Has the approach changed so much that I now need to go at it from a different approach as the UI obviously wont allow me to follow any tutorial? Is there a new tutorial/documentation I can follow with my HM25 installation?

Thanks in advance for any advice that might come my way, I'll take any I can get!

EDIT: When this works, I will most likely end up helping fellow students in class with setting up their crash simulations as most of them opted to just change topologies and do simple linear FEA to validate whether their designs maintain stiffness instead of checking for crash worthiness, as learning this workflow might be too time consuming when your approach at cost optimization is not focussed on material substitution anyways.