I am running a sheet metal forming analysis in Abaqus CAE 6.12, explicit.  The forming dies are 2d analytical rigid surfaces with filleted corners.  The sheet metal is a meshed deformable part. 

My first attempt was to form a ~1mm wide channel with 0.2mm radii fillets.  Abaqus discritized this fillet quite coarse, coarse enough that the sheet metal seems to be experiencing "snagging" -- catching on these non-realistic corners.  The 2e-4 radii I used was the smallest value the fillet tool would accept.  I thought I was up against some strange limit, so I made another model using millimeters as my base length unit in the hopes that the discritization would be finer (width and radii now would be 1 and 0.2 instead of 0.001 and 0.0002), but still appear to be experiencing snagging.

I am investigating several options presented in the documentation, be they all address snagging by changing options in the contact definitions.  What I really want to do is precisely control the discritization (that abaqus is doing inside the black box) when I use the fillet tool in the part sketcher -- right now, that seems to be out of my hands.  I could mesh the dies, I suppose, but feel that the analytical rigid surface is the proper way to skin this cat. 

Any idears?