Several joints are available in LS-DYNA that can be defined between two rigid bodies or nodal rigid bodies. The difficult part of the joint definition from the pre-processing point of view is the creating of nodes that defines the joint axes and subsequent merging of them to the respective rigid bodies. To simplify this problem, LS-DYNA R5 59341 and later versions has a new keyword named *CONSTRAINED_JOINT_COOR_{JOINT_TYPE} that only requires the two rigid body IDs (or nodal rigid body ID) between which the joint is the modeled and the actual coordinates of the joint axis or points. Using this information, LS-DYNA will internally create all necessary nodes and assign them to the respective rigid bodies (or nodal rigid bodies).