My Image Of The Month (IOTM) series has been delayed by many things.  One of those is the complexity of modeling detailed buildings.  I get lost in the details.  With the recent addition and improvements to Blender's Geometry Nodes, I wondered if that would be a good workflow for some of these buildings with complex but repetitive elements.

This section will deal with generating the mesh for a case.  I will initially create a crude wind tunnel model for 2-dimensional (2D) flow over a flat plate.  That is an instance where the geometry could be generated by hand.  I will use simple tools to automate that process and allow for increasingly more complex geometries.

This was going to be a quick end to the turbulence topic (for now), but I fell down a gnuplot rabbit hole.

Keeping track of the physical properties, so that results can be compared to other calculations or real-world data, is difficult for me.  So this section dealing with changes to the Reynolds number needed to be its own section.

My short attention span got bored with all the paraFoam changes in the Cavity Flow tutorial.  So we rejoin that, halfway through...

This entry starts with a simple 2D cavity flow walk-through.

I'm restarting my attempt to understand and become proficient using OpenFOAM.

With the basic game dynamics working, I started to add animation to the assets.  Blender's glTF exporter makes exporting animations to webGL relatively simple, but there were still plenty of Opportunities For Learning (OFL) to occur.  :)

One challenge with working on a project part-time is the variation in the look and feel of the models created.   I didn't have a good sense of whether I wanted the game to feel realistic or cartoony.  I didn't know if I wanted something that felt modern or pseudo-historical.  That generated a wide variation in the assets I created.  But I finally found some reference images that were close to what I wanted, so I went back and started updating the assets, concentrating on keeping everything consistent.

With the basic game dynamics working, it is time to get started on the visual elements of the game.  The plan is to use openGL on a browser for the interactive/dynamic elements.  During the first attempt at creating a game, this was killed the project.  This time, I am trying to take a structured, building-block approach.  Creating the elements has, so far, been fairly simple!

The first task was to design an overall program structure that would share data efficiently between the server (running node.js), the game board (planned to be served in a web browser) and several player mobile devices (also in web browsers).   

One of the many spin-offs from the Game of Life board game was a game called Life on the Farm.  I thought I would attempt to recreate the game on the computer.  Further, I want to  make the gameplay similar to the JackBox games, where each contestant interacts with the game through his or her phone, viewing the game board on a common (usually TV) screen. 

When a family member moved to a different house, I decided to memorialize their old house with a 3-D model and associated visualization.  It had been at least six months since I had done anything architecture-related and I was pleasantly surprised to find that both the Blender 2.8X update and associated Add-Ons continue to make the workflow better and faster!

In my first post about creating terrain in Blender, I discussed using BlenderGIS to combine multiple georeferenced sources into a single terrain.  This post will deal with the addon, Mirage, which I feel is better suited to creating either imaginary terrain, or terrain from an existing heightmap and then adding procedural rocks, trees, vegetation, snow, etc. as material(s) on that mesh.

I have tried creating environments in Blender and other 3D programs.  Usually it involved a lot of time and effort and resulted in frustration.  Part of my problem was that I tried to create too much of the world that was never to be seen by the camera, leading me to my Lessons Learned #1.  I've recently experimented with two Blender add-ons that make the process easier; BlenderGIS and Mirage.  They each have their strengths, depending on what you want to do.

 This is the second in a series. You can start the series here. Building on the previous episode of 3D airflow over a wing section, this episode calculates the lift and drag.

This is the second in a series.  You can start the series here.   The series follows my journey figuring out how to use OpenFOAM for something more than repeating tutorials that already exist!    Sometimes that journey gets a little rocky!   :)

This is Episode 1 in this series using FreeCAD and the CfdOF Workbench  to work through various OpenFOAM cases.  This is a 2D, inviscid, transient run.

Out of a nerdy curiosity, I have been interested in visualizations made possible by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) for some time.  It seems that OpenFOAM is a very capable, open-source option.  However, much of the setup and operation is through individual text files and command-line invocations.  For the 'recreational CFD-er', a Graphical User Interface (GUI) seems to be more productive.

​I'm starting a series of models, all involving commercial airline aircraft.  Starting off is the Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ) 700-series, known as the CRJ-700.