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Welcome to the Blendyn wiki!

Blendyn is a postprocessing tool that helps creating 3D animations from multibody simulation result files.

Blendyn was formely known as mbdyn-blender: what would have been version 1.5.0 of mbdyn-blender was renamed Blendyn, and now the code is distributed on a "rolling" basis.

Blendyn is a Blender add-on, written in Python, that allows to import the output of the free, general purpose multibody solver MBDyn developed at the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology of Politecnico di Milano University. MBDyn does not come with a built-in graphical pre- or post-processor, as it is able to process text-only input files and generates either text or binary (in NetCDF format) output. The purpose of the Blendyn add-on is to exploit the numerous features of the 3D graphics software Blender to post-process MBDyn output data. The add-on is, therefore, strictly a post-processor, but the goal is to make it as useful as possible also during the model definition phase.

Viewed from the perspective of the Blender user, Blendyn is an add-on that provides the ability to animate a 3D model in a totally physics-based way, provided one has a strong motivation in learning how to build an MBDyn model for this purpose :)

Please note that in the current state, the add-on is not complete, especially regarding the visualization of MBDyn elements, i.e. algebraic joint, deformable components, aerodynamic/hydraulic/electrical systems, and so on. Any feedback, help, feature request is welcomed but please be aware that the project is currently maintained by a very small group of developers. Therefore, remember

Patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in mind. -- David G. Allen