[Santos-Dumont]

Hi guys,

I've been doing CFD for over a year now and I am now familiar with GAMBIT and Fluent. I made complicated calculations in 2D and 3D. My masterpiece was a whole aircraft with a lot of details I even teach the GAMBIT/FLUENT basics in my engineer school.

I recently gained access to ANSYS 13. I am disappointed in the softwares.
I mean, Fluent 13 is absolutely perfect. Everything is clear and the defects of the early versions are now gone. Making videos is now a walk in the park.

But I knew Gambit were not used anymore so I tried to do some meshing using ICEM. I have no negative commentaries about the interface which is pretty nice.
But I just don't understand the philosophy of the software. I miss the volume substraction that worked so nicely in Gambit and I don't understand the point of the "blocking".
I spent a couple hours to mesh a single square box in the middle of a pipe in 3D.
From what I think I've understand the idea of blocking is to separate the volume in different blocks to do some precise and less CPU costy meshes than the results you had with the Gambit's size functions. But given the tutorials I've read it seems that everytime you use a new geometry you have to make the blocks to fit around the geometry. How is that even possible with a whole detailed aircraft ??

The difference between Pre Mesh and Mesh is also pretty dark for me. The tutorials are not as comprehensive and clear as they used to be with Gambit.

So I wonder if any of you switched from Gambit to ICEM and had any advices for me ? It would be a shame to use Ansys 13 only for Fluent and still mesh with the oldish Gambit.