thanks Mac for responding. i am a post graduate student at NUST pakistan doing research on incremental sheet forming (which is done on CNC milling)of tailor welded blanks which are used in mainly in automobiles. two sheets may be of different thicknesses and material also are welded prior to forming on CNC. forming sequence is generated through creo or any cad pragramme and then fed into CNC machine to run according to that. i have to simulate it first in Abaqus software. i modeled with simple homogeneous sheet so far and that too has some bugs in it. my target is to model weld zone also which has different properties as regards to weld nugget, HAZ and base metal after welding. i searched for technical papers on it but mostly these do not tell more then this to finely mesh weld zone area and thats all where as i want to incorporate details of separate zones and how to show in abaqus. can you discuss it with someone familiar to it. thanks a lot