News
- The next milestone on the drive toward exascale computing architectures may be carbon nanotude transistors in 2020.
- Leading up to the SC14 supercomputing conference in November is the September issue of their newsletter.
- Strong Simulation Consulting has started a blog about CFD called The Simulation Blog on which I found a post that resonated with me: A Good Mesh is Key To a Successful Simulation.
- Exa reported a good second quarter with revenue up 17% from a year ago to $14.8 million split between licenses ($12.3 million) and projects ($2.5 million).

Use of ANSYS for mixing simulations is the subject of an article on the Leap CFD blog. Click image for article.
Software
- Photogrammetry is now free for everyone courtesy of Acute3D. At SIGGRAPH 2014 the company announced Smart3DCapture Free and Basic editions (the latter costs 199€). Photograph an object from as many angles as possible and use the desktop software to turn them into a 3D model. [Gonna have to try this.]
- Polygonica is software for working with faceted geometry data.
- FlowVision is a finite-volume CFD solver written in C++ and delivered in both serial and parallel version.
Technology
- Solid Edge has started an open source initiative.
- Who in CFD isn’t interested in data visualization? The visualizing data blog summarizes the first half of 2014 with 10 significant visualization developments.
- Supersonic. Supercavitating. Submarine.
- A brief blurb about CFD in the pharmaceutical industry.
- And a brief video blurb about simulation in SolidWorks.
Meshing the Walls
Part interior design, part sculpture, all mesh. The basic forms of this wall-mounted tet mesh seem easy enough to build and install but if you watch the video you’ll see that the manner in which it is lit is an entirely different story. It’s all from an artist group called Antivj.
A quick comment on Smart3DCapture: Autodesk has offered a similar service called 123D Scan for a while as part of their 123D product suite. It has two versions: an iPad/iPhone version and a desktop based on. I played with it for a while – see http://youtu.be/Cn7rKDp2xVY for my best example.
My feedback is:
– Expect the first three scans to be really bad – part of the learning experience;
– Lighting, focus and picture resolution are key – ie forget about outdoor scanning, using the iPad/iPhone version;
– Overall it is an interesting tool to have, and great to have a starting geometry, but cleaning will be required if accuracy is required.
Scanning using Xbox Kinect sensor is also an option as it offers more control and a better accuracy for a cheap price – but it has its pitfall as well…
The correct name is 123D Catch at http://www.123dapp.com/catch
Thanks, Julien. The article says that Acute3D is the source of Autodesk’s capabilities.