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I currently have created a model airplane in Blender by drawing a closed volume with triangular planes. I want to do a FEM calculation on this object, meaning I need a fine 3D tetrahedral mesh of this structure. I have looked at threads like (Creating 3D Mesh from stl files with gmsh) which seems similar, but having encountered issues with GMSH detecting the actual volumes from my exported .stl files, I figured I would ask this community for alternative paths before I push on any further. So:

Can anybody think of an alternative to using GMSH? Any open-source meshing programs out there worth considering?

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  • $\begingroup$ This forum post suggest to use e2aps for the conversion. I have not used, though. $\endgroup$
    – nicoguaro ♦
    Aug 20, 2020 at 14:27

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Tools like gmsh often require more information than STL provides -- the connectivity between triangles of the input surface mesh. You might be interested in trying TetWild, which can apparently reconstruct all of this connectivity information and correct for some level of degeneracy in the input data. The paper about it is very interesting too; they tested their algorithm on several thousand surface meshes from Thingiverse. Their algorithm was able to mesh 99% of these surface meshes, whereas many competing tools (MMG, CGAL, Tetgen) can't successfully mesh anywhere near that number.

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  • $\begingroup$ fTetWild in particular works absolutely fantastic without much input from my side. couldnt install TetWild for some reason.Thanks for the heads up on this package! $\endgroup$
    – Aleksander Bach Lorentzen
    Sep 2, 2020 at 6:13

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