Voxelyze

Voxelyze is a general purpose multi-material voxel simulation library for static and dynamic analysis. To quickly get a feel for its capabilities you can create and play with Voxelyze objects using VoxCAD (Windows and Linux executables available). An paper describing the theory and capabilities of Voxelyze has been published in Soft Robotics journal: "Dynamic Simulation of Soft Multimaterial 3D-Printed Objects" (2014). Numerous academic, corporate, and educational projects make use of Voxelyze.

User guide: https://github.com/jonhiller/Voxelyze/wiki

Documentation: http://jonhiller.github.io/Voxelyze/annotated.html

Basic Usage

Basic use of Voxelyze consists of five simple steps:

1. Create a Voxelyze instance
2. Create a material
3. Add voxels using this material
4. Specify voxels that should be fixed in place or have force applied
5. Execute timesteps

#include "Voxelyze.h"
CVoxelyze Vx(0.005); //5mm voxels
CVX_Material* pMaterial = Vx.addMaterial(1000000, 1000); //A material with stiffness E=1MPa and density 1000Kg/m^3
CVX_Voxel* Voxel1 = Vx.setVoxel(pMaterial, 0, 0, 0); //Voxel at index x=0, y=0. z=0
Voxel1->external()->setFixedAll(); //Fixes all 6 degrees of freedom with an external condition
for (int i=0; i<100; i++) Vx.doTimeStep(); //simulates 100 timesteps

That particular example won't do anything interesting - the single voxel will just stay put. Here is another slightly more interesting example to create and test a 3-voxel cantilever beam

#include "Voxelyze.h"
CVoxelyze Vx(0.005); //5mm voxels
CVX_Material* pMaterial = Vx.addMaterial(1000000, 1000); //A material with stiffness E=1MPa and density 1000Kg/m^3
CVX_Voxel* Voxel1 = Vx.setVoxel(pMaterial, 0, 0, 0); //Voxel at index x=0, y=0. z=0
CVX_Voxel* Voxel2 = Vx.setVoxel(pMaterial, 1, 0, 0);
CVX_Voxel* Voxel3 = Vx.setVoxel(pMaterial, 2, 0, 0); //Beam extends in the +X direction

Voxel1->external()->setFixedAll(); //Fixes all 6 degrees of freedom with an external condition on Voxel 1
Voxel3->external()->setForce(0, 0, -1); //pulls Voxel 3 downward with 1 Newton of force.

for (int i=0; i<100; i++) Vx.doTimeStep(); //simulate  100 timesteps.

For further usage, please refer to the user guide. Complete documentation is avaialable here.

Compiling Voxelyze

The Voxelyze code is structured as a library and compiles on windows and linux. An included Visual Studio project compiles Voxelyze to a static *.lib, and the usual "make" can be executed on linux to build a static *.a library.

Define "USE_OMP" in the preprocessor to enable multithreaded solving.