Hi all. I've spent all evening trying out different meshing and FEA software and gotten precisely nowhere... so I decided it's time to ask. Where is a good place to start? All I'm wanting to do is:
1) Take an existing model (say, exported as STL) 2) Import it 3) Assign material properties, anchor points, and assign forces 4) Run a FEA simulation 5) See the stresses and deflections Seems like a pretty basic workflow, but I can hardly get past the first step. GMSH got me the furthest - at least I could actually see it. But it's just a wireframe, I can't do anything more with it than pan around it, there's no interactive points. The model is just window decor as far as I can tell. I see nothing in the visibility options that makes it any more interactive. (At least this is further than I got with other tools... netgen might as well have had the interface in Swahili). I've tried reading the documentation, but what's called a "tutorial" (http://gmsh.info/doc/texinfo/gmsh.html#Tutorial) is practically an API manual. I've tried watching videos on Youtube, but one, not only do they rarely deal with importing geometry like STLs, but for most programs the interface in the videos looks different from what I see because I use Linux and they use Windows. And the Windows versions usually seem to have more user friendly versions (at least gmsh is better than calculix in this regard, with calculix it's like half the interface is missing....) What do I do? How can I get my bearings here? Any feedback at all would be greatly appreciated... thanks, all. - kv, Karen _______________________________________________ gmsh mailing list [email protected] http://onelab.info/mailman/listinfo/gmsh
