S6E5 - SubSimX: Interactive Subdivision-to-FEM for Computational Design

The gap between geometric modeling and structural simulation has always been a workflow problem as much as a technical one. Every time a designer changes a shape, the mesh breaks, boundary conditions need redefining, and the simulation has to be rerun from scratch. At the scale of iterative or generative design workflows, that overhead compounds quickly.

In this episode recorded at CDFAM Barcelona 2026, Johannes Mueller-Roemer presents SubSimX, a pipeline that addresses this by treating subdivision surfaces as a native simulation medium rather than a preprocessing step. Designers work on a standard Catmull-Clark control mesh. Meshing and boundary...