BlendME

BlendME (Blender Modelling Environment for Architecture) is a tool aimed at rapid design and analysis of commercial and residential building design. It brings together many already existing open-source tools to produce a platform for modelling and interaction of the results of many simulation methodologies.

The use of open-source software as a basis for BlendME is important for the following reasons:

* Scalability : all tools should be able to easily scale across low-cost high performance computing (HPC) clusters (Beowulf clusters) using MPI. This is especially important for computationally-intensive processes such as CFD but also may have advantages in enabling real-time computation of other less-cpu intensive processes such as auralization.
* Low-cost : The building industry is very budget-oriented and in order to improve design and realize the vision of low-energy architecture it is understood that tools must be low-cost in order to improve adoption of technical design tools in the industry.
* Distribution: In order to facilitate education it is important to have a platform which can be distributed as a liveUSB and copied without fear of copyright.

The package currently incorporates:
* 3D Building Information Modelling
* Thermal Energy Modelling (through EnergyPlus)
* Computational Fluid Dynamics (through OpenFOAM)
* Lighting analysis (through Radiance)
* Sun-path analysis

* Import: o gbXML

* Export:
* openFOAM case files
* Radiace case files
* EnergyPlus (.idf) files
* FDS (.fds) files

Further native features of Blender that complement the addon are:
* Interactive walk-through and visualisation
* Photo-realistic rendering through a large choice of rendering engines

In the future it is hoped to incorporate:
* Fire Modelling
* Life-cycle cost-benefit analysis
* Acoustic raytracing and 3D real-time auralization
* Queue/egress modelling

BlendMe isn't available yet, but when it will, it will be commercial/donation based add-on.

Link al sito