organize cases - firetools/blenderfds GitHub Wiki

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This wiki page explains how to organize the namelists of your FDS case

Overall order of the exported FDS namelist groups
Order your geometric namelists with collections
Parenting geometric entities

Overall order of the exported FDS namelist groups

A typical FDS case consists of thousand of lines. BlenderFDS generates a sorted list of FDS namelist groups from Blender Scene, Object, and Material entities.

The order of namelists in the exported FDS case file is the following:

Category	Example namelists	Exported From	Sorting by
General configuration	`HEAD`, `TIME`, `MISC`, `REAC`, ...	`Blender Scene`	Default sorting.
Free text	Any namelist group	`Blender Text`	The position of the `Free text` in the case can be configured in the `FDS Case Config` panel. The `Free text` is inserted as it is in your case, and not checked for validity.
Boundary conditions	`SURF`	`Blender Material`	Only referenced `SURF` entities are exported. They are sorted in alphabetic order by their FDS `ID` identificators.
Domain	`MESH`	`Blender Object`	Sorted in alphabetic order by their FDS `ID` identificators. Grouping by `Blender Collection` is not considered.
Geometric entities	`OBST`, `VENT`, `GEOM`, `SLCF`, `DEVC`, ...	`Blender Object`	Grouped by `Blender Collection` and sorted in alphabetic order by their FDS `ID` identificators.

Order your geometric namelists with collections

There are always many Blender Object entities in a Scene, each of them representing one or more namelist groups. In fact a typical FDS case consists of solid obstacles (e.g., OBST, GEOM), their boundary condition patches (e.g., VENT), many output quantities or control devices (e.g., SLCF, DEVC, ...), and more.

Blender Collection entities help you keep everything organized by allowing you to group related geometric entities together. Collections are used to just logically organize your case, or to facilitate one-step appending or linking between several Blender files or across scenes.

All you need to do to create a new collection is to right-click in Blender Outliner panel and select that top left button. Then drag your geometric entities in and out of your collection.

You can reorder the collections by dragging and dropping their names in the Outliner panel at the desired position. Collections can also be nested.

For example, if you want to have all the domain boundary conditions, assigned with VENT namelists, first in the FDS case file:

create a collection suitably named (e.g., Domain),
put all your MESH and related VENT entities into that collection,
drop the created collection to the first position in the Outliner panel,

as follows:

This example is being exported with the MESH namelists grouped in a separate section, as explained in the previous paragraph. The VENT namelists are grouped in the Domain collection, sorted first in the case before all the other namelists:

--- Computational domain

&MESH ID='First MESH' IJK=... XB=... /
&MESH ID='Second MESH' IJK=... XB=... /

--- Geometric namelists from Blender Collections

-- Blender Collection: <Domain>
&VENT ID='Domain bc VENTs_0' PBX=... SURF_ID='OPEN' /
&VENT ID='Domain bc VENTs_1' PBX=... SURF_ID='OPEN' /
&VENT ID='Domain bc VENTs_2' PBY=... SURF_ID='OPEN' /
&VENT ID='Domain bc VENTs_3' PBY=... SURF_ID='OPEN' /
&VENT ID='Domain bc VENTs_4' PBZ=... SURF_ID='OPEN' /

-- Blender Collection: <Collection>
&VENT ID='Burner' SURF_ID='Burner bc' XB=... /
&OBST ID='Cube' SURF_ID='Material bc' XB=... /
&SLCF ID='Temp slice' QUANTITY='TEMPERATURE' PBX=... /

You can even disable an entire collection from being exported to the FDS case. By toggling the Disable in Renders camera icon of the data-block in the Outliner you can decide whether exporting the related FDS namelist.

See the Domain wiki page for further details on how to manage the computational domain of your complex cases.

See the Collections page of the Blender Manual for a detailes reference on Blender Collections.

Parenting geometric entities

When modeling a compound object, such a table and its chairs, you may choose to model the different parts as separate objects. However, all of the parts may be related to each other. In these cases, you want to designate one object (e.g., the table) as the parent of all the children (e.g., the chairs). Movement, rotation or scaling of the parent also affects the children.

Unlike collections, parenting objects groups them together with a transformation relationship.

Here is the example of the table and its chairs objects, grouped in a Table collection before parenting:

To parent the chairs to the table, drag and drop each chair over the table name in the Outliner panel while pressing the Shift key. After parenting, if you rotate the table, the chairs are rotated accordingly:

See the Parenting page of the Blender Manual for a reference on parenting geometric entities.

Set FDS case variations with view layers

FIXME