Article Number: 113 | VC6 | VC5 | VC4 | VCPS | Post Date: October 23, 2024 | Updated: October 23, 2024
Is it possible to show wheel trajectories?
There are a couple of ways to do this. These are discussed below.
USE Interpositions | VC6 | VC5
First, select your vehicle (or vehicles) and open the “interpositions” menu. Ensure “step” is enabled. Use “criteria: time” and lower the time input to the desired value.
Next, open the “misc” menu and enable “hide body” (learn more).
You will now see all wheel positions at each time-step determined by the “time” input value in the “interpositions” menu. This method has the advantage of providing refreshed trajectories in real-time as simulation inputs change. This workflow is illustrated in the video below.
USE Dynamics report | VC6 | VC5 | VC4 | VCPS
The second way to perform this task is to extract wheel position data from the dynamics report. First, open the “dynamics report” menu (learn more) and enable “wheels” so that the wheel data is included in the report (learn more). Then, left-click “create” to open the dynamics report.
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You can export the full dynamics report by left-clicking the disk button in the upper left corner of the dynamics report window. Note that if you save in .htm format (the default), this file can be directly imported into Excel (learn more).
If you do not wish to save the full report, you can use your mouse to select specific data that you wish to copy and paste into Excel. The dynamics report will show wheel data in the order of axle 1: driver side, axle 1: passenger side, axle 2: driver side, axle 2: passenger side, and so on. Scroll down to your vehicle, then select the wheel data of interest by dragging your cursor while holding the left mouse button. Next, press Ctrl+C, then go to Excel and press Ctrl+V.
Once the data is in Excel, you can delete unneeded rows so that your spreadsheet only contains the wheel’s x, y, z coordinate values.
Save this as a tab-delimited .txt file and close the spreadsheet. Then, drag and drop the .txt into Virtual CRASH, or use Project > Import. Remember to use the appropriate units for your file and disable “swap x-y”. This will import the data as a point array object (learn more)
Set the reference point x, y, z to (0,0,0) in the reference point menu so the points appear at the correct global coordinates (learn more). Then, with the point array selected, left-click on convert > “to polylines” (learn more). This will automatically connect all points with a polyline.
Finally, you can hide the point array and modify the polyline settings as needed.
Note, this same approach can be used to visualize the vehicle CG as well.
Tags: Wheel positions, tire positions, drawing trajectories.
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