A very long time ago, I was trained on ANSYS. The 3D modeling was done from command text file. At the time, I thought this was cool, as I could embed comments in the file. I have played with open source FElt here at home, and it has similar capability. If we are accountable for the results of our analysis, we need to tell other designers/engineers what we are doing.

Does ANSYS still work this way? How much modeling is done with 3D GUI tools? Do the other high-end FEA packages work this way? Do structural engineers take advantage of this?

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JHG