Building objects for human interaction

[Daniel Leib]

Good afternoon,

I'm hoping to eventually use the OpenSIM platform for situations where human subjects interact with other objects, such as a baseball, bike, punching bag, etc. I noticed that the bones used were made using the VTK, an open source C based graphics platform. Unfortunately, I currently have no idea how to use this system, but I am familiar with a few others. Is it possible to bring in objects created in engineering software, such as Rhino, for analysis in OpenSIM? Or perhaps an easy way to convert standard formats like .STL into the appropriate format?

Thanks for any help,

-Dan

[Ayman Habib]

Dear Daniel,

VTK has some converters to import different file formats including STL. You'll need to check kitware's site to find how these are packaged or if they're available in a product that you can download and use directly. Here's a faq page from kitware related to the issue:

http://public.kitware.com/cgi-bin/vtkfa ... 03.002.htp

Please send to the forum whatever tools you find useful in this process to help other fellow OpenSim users.

Thanks,
-Ayman