Welcome to... Our Meshing Roundtable Poster

This year's International Meshing Roundtable was the 29th edition of the event. I've lost track of how many times the Pointwise team within Cadence CFD has sponsored, presented at, and attended this meeting. After all, it's "a small meeting of like-minded companies and organizations striving to establish a common focus for research and development in the field of mesh and grid generation." In other words, if you're involved in mesh generation for any discipline - computational, graphical, animation - the IMR is the place to be.

One of the relatively new additions to the IMR is a meshing contest. The organizing committee provides a geometry model (or models) and asks participants to "show off" - produce a great poster-sized image demonstrating good meshing technique. Normally, the geometry model has some relationship with the host city of the event. But because this year's IMR was an online affair the committee chose a dinosaur theme.

And here's Cadence's entry generated with Pointwise.

It's difficult to read the fine print on the poster but here's the description of the mesh.

"Pointwise was used to generate a hybrid viscous hex-core mesh for the IMR Committee supplied T-Rex surface triangulation. The complexity of the surface mesh illustrates the robustness of Pointwise's anisotropic volume meshing algorithm and the smooth transition from a prismatic near-wall to a hex-core. Considering John Hammond clocked the T-Rex at 32 mph, an initial wall spacing was chosen to properly capture the boundary layer, while the farfield domains were kept close enough to demonstrate Pointwise's adaptation capabilities. The entire mesh was generated automatically and, in the end, consists of 25.4 million tetrahedra, 4.9 million pyramids, 2.7 million prisms, and 13.5 million hexahedra for a total element count of 46.5 million, or 20.8 million nodes."

Not only did the committee's choice of a dinosaur theme resonate with us because of our T-Rex algorithm (anisotropic tetrahedral extrusion) but we've developed a habit of our IMR posters being themed after movies. Our Independence Day poster was a real winner as were several of our other entries over the years.

Alas, our entry did not win this year's contest. Congratulations to our friends from Siemens for that honor. 

But there's always next year. The 30th International Meshing Roundtable will run as a workshop at the SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP22), February 23 - 26, 2022 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle, Seattle, Washington, U.S. What are the odds we'll be meshing the Space Needle?