[Gmsh] STEP import // tangent surface selection

[Michael Hiller]

Dear Gmsh developers, dear users,

first of all I want to thank you for fixing the higher order compound feature – it works like charm now!

I am trying to find a solution how to easily define "Compound Surfaces" now. I have a solid STEP model with almost 1500 surface patches. In the end I want all patches that share a tangent edge to be meshed together as a single compound mesh.

At the moment I have to manually select the patches. It helps to hide by group selection with pressing STRG and drawing a rectangular box in the GUI. But still this is cumbersome for the complete part.

So I was thinking maybe there is something like "Reclassify 2D" for STEP files which I couldn’t find.

Unfortunately I also cannot use some helpful STEP options like exporting feature names or surface colors. With the first option I could do the compound definitions inside CAD. This would generally be a neat feature: you could parametrically define interfaces inside CAD and use them in GMSH for physical entities. I think that the OCC kernel provides option.

Also I don't see an obvious way how to change the surface IDs stored inside the STEP file. This could help by writing a little python script to group surfaces by ordering them inside the step file.

I would be very happy if anyone could provide some further ideas on how to approach this more conveniently.

Thank you and best regards
Michael

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