Multi-Material Tools

This is not a SOFA plugin, but a set of tools to help users to design scenes with partitioned meshes, especially for in multi-material finite-element simulations. SOFA allows the simulation of objects with parts composed of different materials, with different stiffnesses. These require partitioned tetrahedral meshes, such that groups of elements within a single mesh, can be assigned different properties.

Arbitrary surface meshes intersecting,
thus generating the partitioned tetrahedral meshes

These are tools for building SOFA FEM models with multiple materials and organic shapes.

• spline_organ generates swept spline surface meshes.
• Mesh_pipeline combines multiple intersecting surface meshes to generate partitioned tetrahedral meshes.
• demo.scn shows how to use these to build multi-material FEM models in SOFA.
• Finger-edited.pyscn shows how to change the properties of a FEM mesh in a running SOFA simulation using a Python Script Controller.

Potential applications include:

• building realistic anatomical/organic models
• evolution of soft robots.

Keywords: Organic/anatomical shape generation, multi-material FEM, actuation of FEM models

Multiple meshes combined to specify a multi-material object,
and generate the partitioned tetrahedral mesh generated

A final example shows how a swept spline surface is generated and can then be used as a component to build an ‘organic’ multi-material object. Note that many biological growth processes can be described as swept splines, hence their ‘organic’ appearance:

Related gallery item

Licence

This plugin is available under the GNU AfferoGPL open-source license.

Additional informations