This time around I am presenting a alternative mesher to gmsh. The application is called NGSolve/NetGen it’s installable both in Mac and Windows which made me very happy at the beginning. Afterwards I opened a step file with no issues and generated a default mesh (on the windows version).

NGSolve/NetGen mesh in windows

I really liked the visual display and the mesh quality. This is a default mesh.

NetGen Close up mesh

The close up rendering mesh shows good image detail and the mesh elements geometry look more uniform and the circular shape looks well represented through the mesh.

At a first view the mesh seems much better compared to gmsh. There is however a problem. I could not open step and iges files through my mac. This was a frustration…. It seems that the windows version already has a binary file for open cascade which is the library that allows the NetGen software to understand these formats. On the other hand there is no easy way to install the open cascade library on a mac neither it seems to have been tested in detail with netgen.

This is a big frustration point for me.