MGED CMD simulate

BRL-CAD recently integrated a new command in its mged tool, the simulate command. To simulate a cube falling to the ground plane one should follow those steps in order to run it in the mged tool.

BRL-CAD is a CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) program. The representation is done in a system of axis XYZ. The XY axis is the ground axis, so you should make sure later in the tutorial that your ground plane (referenced as "gp") is being parallel with this axis.

First open the mged tool, if you have BRL-CAD installed on your Linux system it should be easy, just type mged in a terminal and a mged terminal should open.

brlcad@brlcad: mged

In the mged terminal select the File menu, and then the New... (file dialog button). A window will appear and a name for your new database will be required. For the purpose of this tutorial we will name the new database, sim1. Introduce the chosen name (sim1) in the "File name:" field and hit save. Now you have opened a new database. Next we want to add some geometry to the database. Something that we will have to simulate on. In the mged command window we will now type the following series of commands :

mged> in Enter name of solid: cube Enter solid type: rpp Enter XMIN, XMAX, YMIN, YMAX, ZMIN, ZMAX: -1 1 -1 1 -1 1

The "in" command creates new geometry, it allows the user to type in the arguments to create a shape with the name provided by the second argument, in the example above is the name provided when "Enter name of solid:" appears on the screen. The arguments of the in command can be provided one by one, as in the example above or in one single line, like in the example below:

mged> in cube rpp -1 1 -1 1 -1 1

We have so far a box, now we want to add a ground plane to our simulation. Now is the moment to remember that the XY axis is the ground axis, so out plane should be parallel to it, that's why we first introduce the lengths of the the ground plane and then we introduce the "thickness", in our case 2mu. The Z axis is up, so the -1mu and +1mu on it gives the "thickness" of our ground plane. (*mu = measuring units, by default it is mm)

mged> in gp rpp -15 15 -15 15 -1 1

You should see now 2 boxes on your screen, one perpendicular on the other one, with a little overlap between them. Using the sed command we will select the box and translate it 100 units on the Y axis.

mged> sed box mged> tra 0 0 100 mged> accept

To be able to run the simulate command our geometry shapes should be grouped in regions to do this we will use the "r" command and create 2 regions for the box and the ground shapes.

mged> r cube.r u cube mged> r gp.r u gp

Now we are ready to run the simulate command:

mged> simulate 100

After the simulation runs its course, we will use the "who" command to find out what objects are being displayed.

mged> who

You should get the following answer:

box ground sim.c

Now, we don't really want to display the box and the ground shapes, we already have them in the sim.c group so we will unload all the geometry(using the "Z" command) and will load only the simulate geometry(using the "draw sim.c" command).

mged> Z mged> draw sim.c

Now to actually see the simulation we will raytrace it, using the "rt" command.

mged> rt

To see the initial position of the cube just type :

mged> draw cube.r