This add-on turns Blender into a GUI for SnappyHexMesh, a volume mesh generation tool for OpenFOAM®, the open source CFD (computational fluid dynamics) toolbox. The add-on exports a complete OpenFOAM case folder structure, with geometry and dictionary files, ready to run OpenFOAM commands including snappyHexMesh. The aim of the add-on is to
- Ease the workflow for importing, updating, modifying and exporting 3D surface meshes to OpenFOAM.
- Allow definition of most common SnappyHexMesh settings via Blender GUI, to reduce need for manual modification of OpenFOAM dictionary definitions.
- Require minimal Blender skills. Geometry can be modelled in any 3D modelling / CAD program which exports a surface mesh format that can be imported to Blender, such as STL or Wavefront OBJ.
The add-on generates OpenFOAM dictionary files for the surface mesh objects in Blender. Dictionary creation is based on string replacements using template files located in the add-on's skel directory. The add-on is meant to work on latest LTS version of Blender and latest stable OpenFOAM.com and OpenFOAM.org versions of OpenFOAM. Tested with Blender 4.2.
To learn to use SnappyHexMesh GUI, have a look at my video tutorial series Blender for OpenFOAM users.
Documentation is located in docs directory of the sources and is viewable online at https://snappyhexmesh-gui.readthedocs.io. Please view the documentation for installation and usage instructions.
If you use this add-on, please star the project in GitHub!
This offering is not approved or endorsed by OpenCFD Limited, producer and distributor of the OpenFOAM software via www.openfoam.com, and owner of the OPENFOAM® and OpenCFD® trade marks.