To really leverage the power of the finite element analysis technique, we need an efficient way of building a structural mesh to analyse. For this task we’re going to use Blender which can be downloaded for free from Blender.org. There are a number of ways we could go about this, but very few options provide us with the convenience and flexibility of Blender. 

After modelling a simply supported beam we’ll generate a mesh across that structure and then write some code to capture the mesh definition and export it to a csv. We’ll also write codes that allow us to define load locations and support conditions. All of this data will be exported to csv files. 

The next step is to bring this data into our Jupyter Notebook - so in the final lecture in this section we’ll write code that imports this data into our Notebook ready for processing in the next section.