Hi all,
I’m just joining the community and I have a project I want to do for my PhD thesis. My research field is wind turbine blades and I’m studing fluid-structure interaction. Since a couple of days I’m trying to get information and ideas on how to start the post-processing of all the data I have into a nice animation and I thought Blender+Python would be a powerful combination. Yes yes yes, before you say it, I’ll say it: I’m reading and watching basic tutorials as well as trying to get information on basic python scripting. but as you know, there are so many things out there to learn that I decided to ask for some help and guidance as I have limited time to be able to get this working and at the same time finishing many other things on my dissertation. As they say, a good way to learn is when you have limited time and things to get done! haha.
Well, I’ll describe a picture of what I have:
I model my blade from standard airfoil sections at certain spans. In between the spans, the airfoil sections are morphed. I’m doing all this with Matlab as later I’m using the crossections to assign materials, internal structure distributions and finally compute rigidity and inertia matrices using finite elements methods (no standard codes, all custom codes under Matlab). Once I have my blade, I also coded a flow dynamic model which will give me aerodynamic forces for my structural model. Long story short, among many other things, I end up having 3 displacements + 3 rotations for every blade section along the blade axis along a time simulation.
Ok, but what do you need to do? (you would ask) :
- I can export every single blade section on a text file with (X Y Z) coordinates. Don’t worry about the internal structures, just the skin of the blade is fine. Yes, all sections with the same amount of nodes to later do the following…
-I should be able to load (and this is when python coding enters the picture) the coordinates into Blender and position them. After that, I should be able to do something like this: Blender Skinning. (Can I also automatize this by coding? …mmm sure I can, I guess)
-Next step would be loading a reference line (blade axis) which has multiple nodes. This reference line should be like a “spine” where every “vertebra” is a node.
-Finally, I should input the 3 displacements and 3 rotations for every node on that reference line for every time-step to be able to animate my simulation results from Matlab. (Yes, I can hear you, bone simulation!)
Well… that’ s all. As you see, I have an idea of what I need to do, but as I’m totally new to this world, I’m looking for help as I don’t know where to start! I would really appreciate any kind of help you could give me. Any tip, any reference tutorial link, python script would be welcome!
Thank you very much for your time and help and I’m looking forward to learn new things and being able in the future to help others too!
Thanks Again.