What’s New in Griddle 3.0

From geometry to grid. Smarter. Faster. Stronger.

Griddle 3.0 takes Rhino meshing to the next level with new tools for unstructured volume meshing and mesh refinement.

Smarter

New tools like GVol and GInt automate complex meshing with greater precision.

Faster

Streamlined workflows reduce modeling time from hours to minutes.

Stronger

Robust meshes built for demanding geomechanical and structural simulations.

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Explore What’s New in Griddle 3.0

Griddle 3.0 brings new tools and major upgrades that transform how you build and refine surface and volume meshes. From advanced unstructured meshing to smarter mesh repair, extension, and cleanup, this release is packed with improvements for faster, more reliable modeling.

New Features and Improvements

GInt: Smarter Surface Mesh Intersection

GInt is Griddle’s powerful tool for making non-conformal surface meshes fully conformal—an essential step before remeshing or generating volume meshes.

Real-Time Visualization: Instantly preview intersecting mesh faces and adjust tolerance on the fly—no need to rerun the tool.
Selective Intersection Options: Choose to intersect only between distinct meshes, within individual meshes, or both.
Preserve Geometry: Non-intersecting quadrilateral faces are preserved as-is—no unnecessary triangulation.
Flexible Workflow: Option to retain and split intersected regions from original meshes for localized corrections.
Auto-Issue Detection: Mesh problems are flagged and grouped into Rhino layers for fast review and repair.

Highlighted faces show incomplete intersections between the dam surface and other meshes indicating insufficient intersection tolerance.

Highlighted faces show full intersections indicating selection of sufficient tolerance.

Intersected faces are highlighted in red. Only the intersecting faces were triangulated.

GVol: Unstructured Volume Meshing Made Smarter

GVol now offers faster, more flexible volume meshing with powerful new features:

Hard Nodes & Edges: Align mesh vertices to custom points and curves for precise control and densification.
Custom Element Sizing: Assign local element sizes to target critical areas.
Fast In-Rhino Visualization: Instantly preview large meshes, poor-quality elements, and subdomains—organized in layers.
Improved Grouping: Subdomains are sorted by volume and assigned consistent, repeatable group names.
Better Error Handling: Mesh issues are flagged and layered before meshing, ideal for cleanup or scripting workflows.
Expanded Export Support: Now includes VTK and improved compatibility with FLAC3D, 3DEC, ANSYS, Abaqus, and LS-Dyna—with cleaner face group naming.

An example showing surface meshes, generated volume mesh, and information about element types / count, meshing issues, poor quality elements (in pink/red), and element groups. Note that some surface meshes are not shown.

A simple volume mesh produced by GVol with 4 hard nodes.

A simple volume mesh produced by GVol with a hard edge split into 4 segments.

GCollapse:
Resolve Overlapping Meshes with Ease

GCollapse is a new tool in Griddle 3.0 that cleans up overlapping or nearly overlapping surface meshes by collapsing them together with precision. The tool streamlines model preparation by resolving surface conflicts quickly and effectively.

Collapse Meshes by Proximity: Snap one mesh onto another or multiple meshes based on a user-defined distance.
Auto Intersection: Seamlessly intersect collapsed areas using an optimized tolerance value.
Split by Side: For single base meshes, split collapsed parts into front and back sections for easier control.
Cleanup Controls: Use a minimum area filter to keep only significant pieces and discard or collapse the rest.

Perfect for preparing complex or imperfect meshes for remeshing and simulation.

An example showing 3 overlapping open pit mining surfaces corresponding to different mining horizons.

GCollapse resolves the overlapping meshes (two calls are needed, one for each mesh) and provides properly separated and intersected surface meshes which form distinct volume domains representing the excavation stages.

Two non-intersecting surface meshes.

The result of using GExtend and ExtendToMesh tool shows the extended and intersected parts of the meshes (in red).

GExtend:
Extend and Connect Surface Meshes

GExtend is a set of tools for extending surface meshes by adding faces along selected boundaries.

ExtendToMesh Tool: Extend one mesh to another and automatically create a conformal connection.
Flexible Direction Control: Extend along local tangents, a user-defined vector, or normal to the surface.
Auto Intersection and Trimming: Automatically trim and align the extended mesh to the base mesh.
Tolerance and Merge Options: Customize tolerance bounds and choose whether to merge the extension.
Built-in Input Checks: Automatically detects input issues before running the operation.

GExtend simplifies mesh repair and helps prepare models for smooth, accurate volume meshing.

GExtract:
Extract Mesh Faces with Precision

GExtract isolates mesh faces based on geometry, size, or position to target and fix problem areas, improving surface mesh quality before volume meshing

Extract WithinDistance: Select faces near points, curves, surfaces, or other meshes within a specified distance.
Extract ByArea: Isolate mesh faces based on user-defined minimum and maximum area thresholds.
Extract ByAspectRatio: Identify long, narrow faces with high edge length ratios that may degrade mesh quality.
Multithreaded for Speed: Faster performance when processing large or complex mesh sets.
Layer-Based Output: Automatically send extracted faces to new layers or sub-layers for easier post-processing.
Built-in Input Checks: Warns users of mesh issues before extraction begins, with control over notification settings.

Faces extracted from the original meshes within some distance from the surface of the tunnel. These faces can now be removed to prevent any interaction between the faults and the tunnel or densified and intersected with the tunnel.

GHeal: Identify and Fix Mesh Issues Automatically

GHeal has been significantly enhanced in Griddle 3.0 to better detect and repair common surface mesh problems, helping ensure mesh quality before remeshing or volume mesh generation.

Ngon Detection and Triangulation: Identify and fix Ngons (faces with more than 4 edges), common in Rhino 8+, by converting them to triangles.
Duplicate Face Removal: Detect and eliminate duplicate mesh faces often introduced by imported geometry.
Reorganized Error Output: The ShowErrors tool now groups and counts all issues for faster review and debugging.
Improved AutomaticHeal Tools
- TriangulateNgons to fix invalid face shapes.
- RemoveDuplicates to ensure clean, unique meshes.
- FixClashingFaces to resolve overlaps, Z-folds, holes, slivers, and other geometry flaws.
- RemoveNonmanifolds to eliminate problematic mesh fragments from scans or imports.
- FillHoles with enhanced speed and reliability.

GHeal makes mesh repair faster, more complete, and more reliable, helping users move from import to volume mesh with fewer interruptions.

GHeal reports different types of issues (under “GHEAL_OUTPUT”)
and specifies their count.

GExtrude: Conformal Surface Mesh Extruder

GExtrude helps create closed volumes by extruding surface meshes along their borders toward a bounding surface. All generated meshes are fully conformal with the original, making them ready for remeshing or volume meshing.

Extrude with Internal Boundaries: Choose to extrude along all closed boundaries or just the exterior edge.
Automatic Mesh Checks: Detects open boundaries and non-conformal edges before running the extrusion.
Merge or Keep Separate: Choose whether to merge the extrusion and cap meshes with the original or keep them as separate parts.

GExtrude simplifies the creation of watertight mesh domains for efficient downstream modeling.

Example of how to build a model domain from several surface meshes (outlined in yellow) using GExtrude. The initial purple mesh was extruded to a plane 10 m underneath it (in brown, top image) to create a domain for embankment/support. The top green mesh was then extruded to the gray plane (-20 m) to create the rest of the model domain.

More Updates and Improvements

GSurf: Surface Mesh Remesher

GSurf improves surface mesh quality, smoothness, and type while maintaining full conformity for volume meshing. In Griddle 3.0, several updates enhance speed and output control:

New Output Option: The DistinctNoInpBnds setting allows remeshing without treating mesh boundaries as skeletons, restoring behavior similar to Griddle 1.0 and improving results in some cases.
Engine Enhancements: Improved remeshing stability and fewer errors when handling complex geometries.
Faster Performance: Multithreading speeds up remeshing for larger or more detailed meshes.

GSurf continues to be an essential tool for preparing high-quality, conformal surface meshes.

BlockRanger: Structured Hexahedral Mesher

BlockRanger is Griddle’s tool for generating structured hexahedral meshes from closed solid geometries. It remains the go-to option for building high-quality, structured models with improvements like:

Custom Slot Assignment
Users can now specify zone and face group Slots for FLAC3D and 3DEC output, improving model organization and scripting workflows.
New Output Format
Volume meshes can now be exported to VTK format, replacing the older CSV option.

BlockRanger remains essential for building structured grids and hybrid models with consistent boundary definition.

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