Treffer: Free-Form Deformation for Computer-Aided Engineering Analysis and Design

Toward support of the use of geometry in advanced simulation, a freeorm deformation (FFD) tool was designed, developed, and tested using object oriented (OO) techniques. The motivation for creating this FFD tool in-house was to provide engineers and researchers a cost efficient, quick, and easy way to computationally manipulate models without having to start from scratch while readily seeing the resulting geometry. The FFD tool was built using the OO scripting language, Python, the OO GUI toolkit, Qt, and the graphics toolkit, OpenGL. The tool produced robust and intuitive results for two-dimensional shapes especially when multiple point manipulation was utilized. The use of ?grouping? control points also provided the user the ability to maintain certain desired shape features such as straight lines and corners. This in-house FFD tool could be useful to engineers due to the ability to customize source code.