Blender2SIMBA

Official Blender exporter for SIMBA

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Blender2SIMBA exports animated Blender geometry into the intermediate HDF5 format used by SIMBA.

The addon evaluates the complete dependency graph, making it compatible with Geometry Nodes, modifiers, animated meshes and dynamic topology.

Blender2SIMBA is the official Blender export pipeline for SIMBA (SIMulation Buffered Animation), an open-source Unity framework for interactive visualization of animated scientific simulations create by the multi2mech research group.

➡️ SIMBA GitHub Repository: https://github.com/multi2mech/SIMBA

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Features

• Geometry Nodes
• Modifier evaluation
• Dynamic topology
• Animated meshes
• Empty frame support
• Collection export
• Multiple object export
• Local or world coordinates
• Float16 / Float32 metadata
• HDF5 compression
• Export manifest
• Export logs

Workflow

Blender Scene
      │
      ▼
Evaluated Geometry
      │
      ▼
Blender2SIMBA
      │
      ▼
Intermediate HDF5
      │
      ▼
SIMBA Converter
      │
      ▼
SHMSH005
      │
      ▼
Unity

How to install?

Edit

Preferences → Add-ons → Install...

Select

Blender2SIMBA.zip

Enable

Blender2SIMBA

The addon appears under

View3D → Sidebar → SIMBA

How to use?

Export from Blender:

Import in Unity:

Supported Blender Features

• Geometry Nodes
• Modifiers
• Armatures
• Shape Keys
• Curve objects
• Surface objects
• Text objects
• Meta objects

Output

The addon exports one synchronized HDF5 file for every object.

Each file stores

• vertices
• connectivity
• animated topology
• timing information
• metadata

Multiple objects remain perfectly synchronized through empty frames.

Compatibility

Compatible with

• Blender 4.x
• SIMBA v1.1+

Future Work

• Direct SHMSH005 export
• Volume meshes
• Scalar field export
• Native SIMBA package export

Citation

If you use Blender2SIMBA to generate data for academic research or scientific publications, please cite this software.

Mastrofini A.

Blender2SIMBA:
Official Blender export pipeline for the SIMBA framework.

Multiscale and Multiphysics Mechanics Group (M2M)
Department of Civil Engineering and Computer Science Engineering
University of Rome Tor Vergata
Rome, Italy

https://github.com/multi2mech/Blender2SIMBA

A CITATION.cff file is included in this repository for automatic citation support on GitHub.