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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.
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
The Blender 2.8x version of Blendyn is now considered the baseline code for
development, while the 2.7x version has been moved to the blender27 branch and will not
be updated, apart from occasional bugfixes, from now on. Therefore, the master branch now
points to the Blender 2.8x version, be careful when updating!
The porting of Blendyn to the new Blender 2.80 API has been completed and is now available
in the blender28 branch. If you are an interested user, please try it out!
You can find the main Blendyn menu in the Sidbar Panel, accesses by pressing the N key.
Please report any bugs in the Issues section.
Please note that the documentation is currently lagging a little bit behind the latest code,
especially in the blender28 branch. Basically, you might find some small differences in
the addon UI with respect to what is described in the Wiki. The hope is that those differences
are small enough that they are not show-stoppers! The docs will be updated as soon as possible