A Self-Contained, Multigrid-Accelerated Topology Optimization Add-on for Blender

Abstract

We describe Blendtopo, an open-source add-on that performs density-based (SIMP) structural topology optimization directly inside the 3D content-creation tool Blender. The pipeline voxelizes a user-defined build space, solves the linear-elastic state equation with a matrix-free finite-element method, and updates an element density field by the optimality-criteria method, rebuilding a closed surface after every iteration. The add-on runs entirely inside Blender on open-source code: there is no separately installed finite-element solver and no scientific-Python stack to configure. The solver uses a geometric-multigrid preconditioner whose conjugate-gradient iteration count is grid-independent over the range measured, a coarse-to-fine continuation with displacement and density warm-starts, and an optional GPU backend. We report measured crossover points for every backend choice the add-on makes automatically.