How do you create your 2D geometries in Blender?
 

I am trying to use an existing 2D CAD drawing imported into Blender to create a 3D model so that I can use swiftBlock to create the blockMeshDict for OpenFOAM. From tutorials I have seen that the general way of doing this is to create faces made up of 3-4 points (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLmlrc3vb1s) and then extrude the component however in my case there are a lot of points and will take a long time to create the required number of faces. Could anyone please let me know if this is the method you also use for your 2D cases or is there a much faster way of doing this?

I asked about this on the Blender forum but I have noticed that the majority of the Blender users "sculpt" their models rather than create from 2D drawings therefore, I was not able to get much help.

I have managed to create simpler geometries without arcs and it worked fine the problems occur when I try to create it with the arcs. My other idea was to make the arc a straight line in blender and then manually change it to an arc in the created blockMeshDict file, however this did not work either as I could not create the faces using only hexahedrals in blender.

I am really struggling, could someone please help me with this by showing or explaining to me what procedure I should use to create the geometry? If a simpler alternative to Blender/swiftBlock exists for this geometry which is compatable with the solidMechanics solvers in OpenFOAM please let me know.

Two solutions I found to this problem for anyone who encounters them in the future:

• For complicated geometries with many vertices I have used the "Grid Fill" tool, it generated all hexahederal mesh automatically and took 2 minutes, this can be adjusted and offset if the "F6" key is pressed directly after using the function.

• However, this tool does not work for all geometries and can have strange results on some where the mesh is very fine at some points and very coarse at others, to create a more even mesh I manually created the faces. For the arcs I first had to reduce the number of vertices, this was done by either: (1) Using the checker deselect, setting it to "2" and dissolving the vertices OR (2) using the remove doubles function to delete the additional vertices. The vertices were then spaced out evenly using the "space" function and the faces were created.

I hope this helps someone as I faced many problems with this, if anyone has any other method for generating 2D geometries inside of blender which are compatible with swiftBlock then please let me know.