Fully 3D internal/volume meshes in Blender?

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
,
1

Hello all!

This may be a stupid question but I was doing some googling and really didnt find much.

Does anyone know if at any point in the future Blender will support volume meshes? I.e. fully 3D meshes with internal elements?

The reason I ask is, I very much enjoy leveraging Blender’s meshing capabilities for my purposes which are engineering related. I would kill to be able to use Blender to develop meshes for CFD modelling. But this requires internal mesh elements.

Is this on the radar? Or am I totally missing existing functionality that covers this?

Thanks

3

you add any internal features inside

why do you say you cannot do that in blender ?

is there some special tools for that may be ?

happy bl

4

I assume you mean tetrahedral meshes/tracking tetrahedra? I am not aware of any plans to do this at the moment.

5

yes I mean either tetrahedral or arbitrary polyhedral meshes…perhaps something like this:

image

image
image800×450 220 KB

like a 3d mesh you would generate in gmsh…

if that’s the case, too bad…would love to use blender for this type of application

6

add a suggestion to Dev on their forum
who know might be a new feature later on

happy bl

7

Blender can’t handle effectively advanced techniques such as constructive solid geometry. However it can emulate to some extent with particles/vertices (source) > metaballs (geometry generation) + boolean modifier (clean cuts with BoolTool).

8

i think it can be managed with animation nodes. with using particle points emitting from object volume as source. Can’t say if the result would be accurate though

9

I wouldn’t call CSGs “advanced”. We had many of them in Real3D v1 in 1990 - 30 years ago. Although modernized and new tools have been added, here are the analytic objects and the boolean operators.
I believe modern tools (like Solidworks) which supports CSGs, render them through tesselation. Real3D/Realsoft3D rendered them (and nurbs) without tesselation. A sphere would always be smooth no matter the magnification, and due to being formula/parameter driven, it didn’t have any terminator issues. Although path tracing (or GI) wasn’t invented then, a path tracer being able to intersect rays with a formula should in theory be able to do the same thing. Float accuracy was a problem though, can’t make a to relative scale solar system i.e. (which I did). Newer version was a bit more advanced though, in that you could convert meshes into boundary objects that worked with booleans, and constructors that did compound CSGs (lathe, tube etc). I miss them dearly, especially the rendering quality of the sphere and just how powerful booleans were.

10

It would be great to be able to model volume structures with random cavities, sort of volume voronoi. It would be very useful to model bone structures, porous rocks, sponges etc. I have not found a way to do it in either Maya nor Blender