Questions and discussion for this lecture live here. Fire away by hitting Reply below 
Made it through:
“Finite Element Analysis of 3D Structures using Python” the initial theory sections and now into blender, but you started talking about Jupyter Notebook and I am confused. What is this and is this something I need to download in addition to Blender to do this course?
Hi Juliana,
Jupyter Notebooks are what we use to write our Python code in. They’re a fantastic tool that allow you to get up and running quickly with Python. They’re a great way to perform data analysis, visualisation and to document what you’re doing all in one place.
Take a look at this lesson to get a quick overview.
Within this course (and all of my FE/modelling courses), we generally do initial structural modelling in Blender, because it’s fast and pretty intuitive when you get the hand of it. Then we use the Python code we write in a Jupyter Notebook to analyse the structure and then, optionally, we export the deflected shape back into Blender so we can see it beside our original model.
If you have any other questions don’t hesitate to ask.
Seán
1 Like
Thank you so much for explaining this, especially with the extra lesson. I had to wait a week for IT to install anaconda to my terminal 
so I decided to give the course a break until I had access to jupyter notebooks. Incidentally, I’m from Plymouth UK now living outside Los Angeles. I graduated with Composite materials engineering degree from Plymouth back in 2001, and have only used CATIA and MATLAB, Blender is so much more fun and jupyter looks very intuitive. Thank you for cluuging this methodology together. I really appreciate being able to do open source software from home outside of work.
Wow, small world…my wife and I were just over at Plymouth Uni for her PhD graduation a couple of weeks ago.
I too moved to Python after a long time working with Matlab, you shouldn’t have any trouble remapping your brain from Matlab’s matrices over to Numpy arrays.
Shout if you need anything else.
Seán