Road PCD Marker Broken

WillJones0701 · 2025-06-11T09:39:15+00:00

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Hello all,

I am trying to use a custom PCD road by following the various guides. But the .rdf file when importing into Motionview has this weird spike that seems to be where the road marker is.

Is there a way that I can fix this because the Hypermesh part looks normal, also the .fem file seems to look like others I have seen

see attatched files for .fem and .rdf if that is the problem

Hyper mesh is on the origin 0,0,0

widerfem.fem

widerdf.rdf

This is for a university thesis so help would be much appreciated

trackwide.hm

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HyperMesh

MotionView/MotionSolve

Accepted answers

Christopher_Fadanelli

Hi @WillJones0701 ,

Thank you for sending the updated files. I also observed the same behavior as you. My initial guess is that it still has to do with the setup of the elements in the .fem file. So in Hypermesh, I combined all the surfaces together and re meshed it with free tria elements (size 100).

I imported the road into MotionView and the vehicle traverses over it.

Attaching the updated files.

trackwide_v03.fem

widerdf_test_v04.rdf

To have the AutoTire Entities reference the road. Go to AutoTires> Tires> select the tire, in the entity editor you can update the road profile.

For more reference I would suggest to go over our free eLearning's.

Introduction To MotionView

Vehicle Modeling

Best,

Christopher Fadanelli

All comments

Vishvam

Hello @WillJones0701,

There are some best practices for creating a PCD road. I have attached a ppt showcasing it.

Although your .fem file looks fine, but the complete mesh doesn't seem to be connected when I select the elements using "attached" option. That means there are some gaps in between. Also try to make it a single component instead of multiple, tria mesh are always preferred.

pcd_road.pptx

See below attached image from your FEM file. The mesh needs to be continuous as shown in the ppt.

Christopher_Fadanelli

Hello @WillJones0701 ,

Going off of @Vishvam , another good source for generating the road surface can be found here:

https://community.altair.com/discussion/61869/generating-a-softsoil-surface-in-hypermesh-for-motionview-analysis

It is used for soft soil road, but the process in HyperMesh is the same (just an extra rdf for MotionView). Make sure that the nodes/elements are renumbered starting from 0 and incrementing up by 1. In addition, it is preferred to have the surface aligned in the ZX plane.

Hope this helps.

Best,

Christopher Fadanelli

WillJones0701

It was the origin that was the problem in the end, that video helped.

A follow up if you could, now that its in there it doesn't go over the road just drives flat.

Even with the road course event switched to the .rdf file

i am using MF tire as per this tutorial and have made sure everything is the same

https://community.altair.com/discussion/35248/realistic-road-simulation-using-point-cloud-data-roads-in-motionsolve

I downloaded the model for this and just replaced the road here with my road, and this also didn't work making sure that everything else was the same apart from the .rdf file in the event.