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Blender Drydock Project

This project will develop a tool for testing the assembly of concrete OTEC plantship hulls in a drydock. It starts with a drydock basin of sufficient size to hold the hull of the OTEC plantship.  The initial animation will show the parts to be assembly being added in a planned sequence. The parts just appear in their location. In a second scene, the parts are moved through space to their location. Finally, a crane, a robot, or a special tool is added to the scene to control the part as it moves through space to their location.

The models will be build using the blender application and the physical animation of the crane operations will use the bullet physics engine and the blender game engine to control the movement of objects during an assembly activity.

The parts to be installed will be the reinforcing rods used in the concrete of the hull, the cement forms to hold the wet concrete in place during the construction of the hull, and then the concrete as it is poured into the forms. Blender includes a fluids simulation capability that should be able to show the flow of the concrete into the forms.

The project will need to use the latest developer's version of blender, as of this writing it is  alpha2. It wasn't practical to do this project with blender 2.49 and earlier versions. As of blender 2.50 the API and user interface is now very well suited to adding CAD features to the blender mesh tool. Many people have been trying to adapt blender for use in mechanical CAD. There has been limited success, but design limitations of the earlier version of blender made the work difficult. With blender 2.50 I think it will be relatively easy to build a robust parametric design tool, which in turn will foster the creation of an open source CAD package for designing structures.

There will be some rough spots in using blender alpha2 and the Python libraries used by Ubuntu. The blender distribution includes an embedded version of Python 3.1. The default version of Python found on Ubuntu is Python 2.6.4. The jump from 2.6 to 3.0 of Python created some incompatibilities, so beware when reading the documentation that there are some differences. I expect these problems will be cleaned up in about a year. For now some additional work will be required if part of the software is only available, such as numpy, for Python 2.6. The numpy package is a Python extension for scientific computations. It is very similar to MatLab.

This is an open source project, participants will receive all of the intangible benefits of being on a collaborative project. Since the tasks I've described are non-specific to my business objectives, this will be developed using the project management tools.

We hope to attract other blender-cad developers to help expand the tool. Participants will likely be able to start consulting businesses in which you would customize the software to be used as a domain specific design tool, such as designing alternative parametric design tool for machine designs. Once you see how the animation and game engine portion of blender works, I think you will understand why I think blender has great potential for this type of application. The entire assembly process could easily be animated using blender.