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Software Products

CAD-Based Meshing Capabilities

Itasca's offers a CAD-based interactive mesher called Griddle. Griddle is a plug-in for Rhinoceros 6.0 3D CAD software. The entire meshing process is done within the Rhino environment.

What is Rhino?

Rhinoceros 3D CAD software is a solid modeling tool for designers and engineers. Rhino allows you to build the geometry and directly using curves, surfaces, and solids while Griddle provides surface and/or volume meshing capabilities. With Rhino you can also import, create, edit, and export objects as DXF or STL files for use in Itasca software (FLAC3D, 3DEC, PFC) as geometry (e.g., surfaces as geological features, liners, or topology and lines as ground support tendons).

Please note that:

  • Rhino can be purchased at a reduced price when bundled with Itasca software.
  • Itasca’s all-hexahedral, structured meshing tool BlockRanger is included in Griddle.
What is Griddle?

Griddle is a Itasca's interactive Rhino CAD-based meshing product. Griddle allows you to easily build unstructured meshes for simple to very complex 3D geometries. This powerful, easy-to-use, automatic mesher requires minimal input from the user to build meshes for simple to very complex geometries. After the model geometry is built or imported into Rhino, Griddle allows you to automatically remesh the surfaces to the desired density and type (triangles, quadrilaterals). The Griddle volume mesher is then called to fill the geometry with zones (all-tetrahedral or hex-dominant). A Griddle meshing workflow is shown below.

Surface remeshing allows excellent control over element sizing, including honoring hard edges and points (edges and points that need to be on the surface). Griddle can produce triangle, quad-dominant, or all-quadrilateral surface meshes.

Surface meshes are used directly by the Griddle volume mesher. The final solid elements composing the mesh (hexahedrons, tetrahedrons, prisms, pyramids) have faces that coincide with the input surface mesh.

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