There seems to be some confusion out there about Gridgen and Pointwise and their relative capabilities. Specifically, some people think Gridgen only generates structured grids and Pointwise generates only unstructured meshes. That’s simply not true.

Pointwise meshes everything Gridgen does and more.

Pointwise generates all the types of meshes Gridgen can – structured, unstructured, and hybrid – and more. (Diagram not to scale. For illustration purposes only.)

The illustration above is perhaps the world’s worst Venn diagram but hopefully delivers the message. Pointwise generates all the types of meshes that Gridgen can but also has considerably more capability – both in terms of meshing algorithms and the broader feature set.

Back in 1984 Gridgen started out with only structured grid capability. If someone told you it still only does structured grids they’re stuck in 1998, the year we added unstructured meshing.

When we started work on Pointwise in about 2003 it inherited all of Gridgen’s meshing algorithms, from structured to unstructured and hybrid, including the most advanced technique for hybrid meshing, anistotropic tetrahedral extrusion (T-Rex).

Yes, we certainly have been working on and talking about T-Rex a lot recently. But that doesn’t mean Pointwise is a one-trick pony.

If you’re interested in learning more about everything Pointwise can do from reading your CAD data, to assembling solid models, to surface and volume meshing, to exporting data for your flow solver check out www.pointwise.com/pw.