Interpolation of Motion in NI Insight

[J Bowen]

I'm trying to use NI insight to show the motion of a part from accelerometer data.  I haven't performed the data acquisition yet but I have been using made up data to figure out the visualization side of it.  Here is my problem:

When I load a VRML file into IN Sight, and link a channel to it (telling Insight to present this data as displacement along Z axis) the resulting deformation that I see is only applied to 1 face of the part.  I used the VRML compression utility that comes with Insight, and I assume the resulting object only has one surface (as it comes in all as one color).

Are there any special settings I need to do when exporting a VRML from my CAD program?  (I'm using UGS NX4).  Thanks in advance for any help.

[Brad_Turpin]

Hi J Bowen,

Yes, you need to export the VRML file with an explicit mesh.  What CAD software are you using?  Several CAD software packages such as ProE tend to export their models with disconnected components/sub-objects, but INSIGHT requires an explicit mesh connecting all nodes in order to correctly interpolate.  In almost all cases the CAD software has the ability to apply an explicit mesh prior to exporting to VRML.  There should be some help for this in a few CAD packages at www.ni.com/insight.

Brad Turpin
DIAdem Product Support Engineer
National Instruments

[J Bowen]

I'm using the NX4 release of Unigraphics (UGS).  There seems to be a simple export to VRML but I haven't found any more advanced configurations for the export.  Also I have tried using the VRML utility that comes with NI insight and I still have this error (of one face moving).  I didn't see a specific tutorial for exporting for Unigraphics.