I am about to attempt to mesh a car that was designed in Solidworks. I plan on exporting the vehicle CAD files as .stl.

My questions:

1) There are many parts that are under the body of the car and do not need to be included in the analysis. Should I just suppress these, or when I when I use pro-surf can I just select the surfaces I want to be included in the surface mesh?

2) The body is made of panels that DO NOT form a continous surface. They have design clearances in them so they fit together easy. The clearance is about 1mm between the panels. How is pro-surf going to handle this? Can they be stitched together for the analysis? It seems like this kind of discontinuity probably will cause issues unless there is a built in way to deal with them up front.

Thanks in advance to anybody who replys!

use the surface wrapper not pro-surf

Thanks Ben, I've never heard of that utility. Is that something I would find within Pro-Star?

It is in the Proam. It is located at Proam -> Prepare Surfaces -> Create New Surfaces -> Surface Wrapper

Thanks Airfoild. This will make my life a lot easier

Use STAR-CCM+ wrapper option.. it is very easy than proam wrapper..

if you use STAR-CD V.4 you can transfer your volume mesh from STAR-CCM+ to STAR-CD v.4... as *.ccm file..

Else if you use STAR-CD v.3.2x you can transfer your surface mesh..