Viz Worth Watching

We're Moving!

2011-05-17T13:28:00.001-04:00

Hey everybody. Thanks for tuning into Viz Worth Watching over the years. We've enjoyed sending out news bits to you.

It turns out that as technology moves on, we've started using new technology like:

Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ceisoftware

Mailchimp Newsletters http://www.ceisoftware.com/contact/newsletter/

and a new website http://www.ceisoftware.com

So, were going to make this our last blog post on Viz Worth Watching

you can find our new blog at http://www.ceisoftware.com/blog/

Over and out from CEI.

iPhone app translates languages in real time

2010-12-17T11:51:00.001-05:00

Okay this has nothing to do with EnSight.

But if you have an interest in international traveling, augmented reality, amazing software, and/or iphones then this might catch your fancy.

My colleague Jay showed this to me this morning. Its an app on the iPhone that you point the camera of the iphone at, it shows you the scene in front of you with the text in the scene translated to your language. We only tried the demo, which reverses the words, hello becomes olleh, but the rest of the scene is unchanged. This makes it very natural to walk around a museum in France, look at a menu in Spain, and see the contents in your native language.

Amazing. And its better than Google Goggles, because it does it in real time, on a phone, and doesn't require an internet connection.

Currently only works with Spanish to English, but more languages are surely on the way.

Watch the demo movie at the bottom.

AIAA ASM 2011

2010-12-15T10:06:00.003-05:00

CEI is proud to announce that it will be exhibiting at this year's AIAA ASM 2011 conference in Orlando, Florida on January 4-7. We will be set up in booth 1012, be sure to come by and see what's the latest and greatest in EnSight and EnSight CFD.

SC10 EnSight Customer Dinner

2010-10-22T10:17:00.004-04:00

Please come dine with us in New Orleans during SC10!

CEI is very pleased to invite you to our customer appreciation dinner as a part of SuperComputing 2010 (SC10). This year SC10 is in New Orleans, so we are dining to a New Orleans theme, catered by the 7 on Fulton restaurant.

As a benefit to the dinner, we will be sharing the upcoming release of EnSight 9.2 and EnSight 10.

We hope you will find time to join us. We can only accommodate about a dozen customers so please register as soon as possible.

http://www.ensight.com/Events/2010-sc10-ugm.html

Details

Date: Tuesday 11/16/10 from 6:30pm-9:30pm food will be brought out @7.

Location: Wyndham Riverfront New Orleans Hotel, Rex B ballroom. 701 Convention Center Blvd.

Map

The menu is:

1^st Course: Seafood Gumbo

2^nd Course: Alligator Ravioli

Entrée Choice:

a) seared scallops with braised short ribs

b) or a grilled ribeye steak

Dessert: Louisiana Bread Pudding

There will also be bread and butter. Drinks include iced tea, water or soda. Alcoholic drinks can be purchased outside of the room at the bar and brought in, but at your own expense.

Need some other details?

Call Eric O'Connell

eric@ensight.com

919.363.0883

This is not visualization, but it might be useful

2010-10-13T16:59:00.001-04:00

This is not about data visualization. Actually its about hiding data. Hiding your personal credit card, identity, log-ins, etc. using a software program.

I've been using 1Password on the Mac for years and would have gone insane without it. Occasionally a friend, a PC friend, will ask if it also works on Windows. With a touch of glee I answer "no". But since I also use a PC from time to time, that was really a bittersweet situation.

Good news, 1Password is now on Mac, iPhone, Windows, and Android phones. So everyone, enjoy. As my neighbor used to say "mangia, mangia".

Now, back to our regular world of data visualization.

IEEE Visualization Contest 2011

2010-10-08T12:49:00.001-04:00

Big Data Viz Contest. Prize: iPad.

CEI is proud to sponsor the IEEE Visualization Contest of 2011 which this year targets the field of fluid dynamics.

The data from the contest is already in EnSight Case format. Giving all you EnSight users a leg up.

CEI is sponsoring a prize for the winner, an iPad. We sure hope an EnSight user is the winner. We'd love to give that iPad to an EnSight user. However, CEI is not the judge panel of this contest, so you'll have to give it your best effort.

The goal is to devise a visualization that allows for exploring the stability of a fluid dynamics simulation of a pump with respect to different models of its turbulences.

Any entries from EnSight customers will also receive a small gift from CEI in appreciation of the effort of competing.

Good luck.

HPC Wire article about CEI customer P&G

2010-10-07T09:24:00.000-04:00

Potato Chips, Diapers, Laundry soap and more are all improved by EnSight. Bet you didn't know that.

Read about P&G usage of CAE and HPC in this article.

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/High_Performance_Potato_Chips.html?viewAll=y

Yes, I know EnSight is not mentioned. Does that mean EnSight is not important to P&G? Or does it mean that its the secret sauce they don't want to let out? No, I guess the secret sauce problem is a different company.

EnSight helps with Land Speed Record - New York Times

2010-10-05T05:09:00.000-04:00

400 MPH bullet trains? Ha! I laugh at 400 MPH. How about 800 MPH?

EnSight was used to help go for the land speed record. How did it turn out? Read more at the New York Times article. Here. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/science/21speed.html

Quick preview from EnSight. Bigger version in the article.

EnLiten Tip - Unpacking for cross-platform

2010-09-30T20:31:00.001-04:00

Are you using EnLiten files to show colleagues and customers your simulation results?

If so, are you using the "self-extracting" or "pack-n-go" feature?

The one problem that might occur is that you give one of these files to a Mac user, what can they do? How can a Mac user to play a "self-extracting Windows EnLiten File" on their Mac?

I know the .els content is in there somewhere. Trying to open it by just selecting it in Mac EnLiten seems like the natural thing. Barring that, how can I "show the package contents"?

Solution:

Basically, there is a program
in the 'apex12' directory (command line only) that can extract
the embedded files from both version 1 and version 2 pack and
go files from any target architecture to your current platform.
It is called 'unpackngo' of course :). Some details from the
FAQ:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
There are two versions of CEI pack and go executables.

Version 1 files are generated from within EnLiten on the Windows platform only. In this case, when you run the embedded .exe the "File" menu will have a"Save extracted embedded files..." menu option that can be used to extract the .els files. Note: V1 files can also be extracted on other platforms using the unpackngo application documented for version 2 files.

Version 2 files are generated from the GUI or scripts within EnSight and are available on most platforms. They can contain EnLiten, EnVideo or Reveal files. In this case, there are command line options and a stand-alone tool that can be used to extract the files on any platform. If you run the embedded .exe with the -help option:

{embeddedfile} -help
Copyright (C) 2006, Computational Engineering International
Architecture: win32 Version: 1.00 Build date: May 15 2007
Usage: c:\Program Files\CEI\apex12\machines\win32\unpackngo.exe [options]
Options:
-dst {destdir} Select destination directory (default:system temp)
-src {archive} Select source (default:this file)
-key {key} Verify digital signature using key (default:none)
-extract Extract files from archive (default: run files)
-v Verbose mode

To extract the embedded files, use the following command:

{embeddedfile} -v -extract -dst c:\some\path\to\save\files\in

In the latest versions of EnSight there is a tool called: 'unpackngo.exe' that can extract files from an embedded executable. The most recent versions can extract files from both V1 and V2 formats. An example (under Windows):

unpackngo.exe -v -extract -dst c:\some\dir -src {embedded.exe}

unpackngo also works cross-platform. We supply unpackngo on Unix as well as Windows and it can extract files from any target architecture. The program is located at: $CEI_HOME\apex12\machines\$CEI_ARCH\unpackngo

EnSight interface added by Numeca

2010-09-30T20:09:00.001-04:00

Numeca makes the FINE/Turbo turbo-machinery CFD package and Fine/Hexa unstructured CFD package which is mostly dedicated to the automotive market.

Numeca's Fine/Hexa is getting an EnSight Case Gold format export this fall. Fine/Hexa customers can contact Numeca for a release date and details.

German customers should note that Numeca has a user conference 26-27 October.

AVL Fire Gains EnSight Export

2010-08-25T10:17:00.001-04:00

AVL Fire is a CFD code used to simulate combustion in automotive engines, among other things.

AVL has decided to develop an export from Fire to EnSight. It will be released in the 4th quarter of 2010. Contact AVL for details.

Camaro Underbody Design

2010-08-25T09:59:00.009-04:00

The goal for this project is to increase the downforce of a 1997 Camaro SS by large amounts using a full underbody tray to take advantage of ground effects to the utmost extent. The first step was to take the car to a wind tunnel to get a baseline of where the lift and drag coefficients are currently with an unmodified body. These measurements will be used for comparison with the CFD data to ensure accurate results. The next step was to get the car digitalized. This was done with a White Light scanner courtesy of Craig Derian at Stackpole Engineering in Charlotte, NC. When the data was received the prototype of the underbody was attached to the car's surface using Solidworks and then was exported to Ansa to preprocess the surface mesh. Once the surface mesh was acceptable the mesh was exported as a Nastran file to be used in StarCCM+. In StarCCM+ the Camaro model was setup with a both a rolling road and a stationary ground to compare the boundary layer effects. After the simulations were run, the data was then exported to EnSight. While in EnSight the client-server function was used to create images. The benefits of the client-server feature was that the post processing on a very large CAD file could be done on a small ram computer, with the large CAD file stored and processed on a high RAM machine.

Contributors: George Fusner, Aaron Rinehimer, Dr. Mesbah Uddin

Tongue and cheek about EnSight

2010-08-12T17:21:00.001-04:00

Last night there was some bad snoring going on. And it was keeping me awake, so we know who was doing the snoring.

So this story arrived at the perfect time.

Mark Carlson, a really good user of EnSight and a pro user of MSC FEA tools like MSC.Marc, MSC.Dytran, MSC.Patran, and MSC.Nastran sent over this article about his work in simulating sleep apnea.

It's nice to see EnSight used to cut down on the world of snoring.

EnSight 9.1.2a

2010-07-08T16:55:00.001-04:00

EnSight 9.1.2a is only supposed to be a patch or bug-fix release. Apparently no one told the developers at CEI about that. So there's a bunch of nice improvements in EnSight 9.1.2 including using less memory than any previous version of 9, being faster, having better CFD and FEA readers, and over 100 minor enhancements.

I know that one of the most popular improvements is going to be linked viewports in EnLiten. EnSight has long had linked viewports but until 9.1.2 these links didn't carry over into a saved EnLiten .els file. Well now they do. That makes showing multiple models from the same angle as you are rotating the view drop dead easy now. Unfortunately it doesn't work on old EnLiten files, only new ones being created going forward.

For those who are into the new Volume Rendering feature, EnSight 9.1.2 now includes support for Volume Rendering on visualization clusters running EnSight DR, in other words for really, really big models.

Web page announcement for 9.1.2a.
Release notes for EnSight 9.1.2a

We hope you like the improvements, many of them were driven by your requests. But of course EnSight usability and robustness remained a key focus for us.

You can download EnSight 9.1.2a here: http://www.ensight.com/Downloads/

EnSight Team

P.S. at the same time we released EnSight CFD 3.0, now with its own variable calculator.

Visualizing a Dog's Nasal Cavity

2010-05-13T14:30:00.003-04:00

In the Mechanical Engineering Department and Applied Research Lab at Penn State we are studying how the dog's nose has evolved to efficiently deliver chemical signals to the olfactory (sensory) region of the nasal cavity. This video shows how amyl acetate is deposited in the nose during a sniff.

We recently completed large scale simulations of chemical transport through the dog's nasal airways, but visualizing the data has proven to be a challenge because of the complex geometry of the dog's nose. We found that using Ensight's python scripting capabilities allowed us to visualize terabyte-scale data sets and understand the significance of of our results.

Contributors: Michael Lawson, Brent Craven, Gary Settles, Eric Paterson

Transparent car to help sell oil

2010-04-23T16:42:00.001-04:00

I wonder how expensive it was to make this car?

Transparent Nissan 370Z

Iceland Volcanic Plume visualized by NASA's CALIPSO Satellite

2010-04-21T11:13:00.001-04:00

Kurt Severance of NASA Langley Research Center pointed us to some very interesting work on the recent Iceland volcano plume that was disrupting air travel in Europe. EnSight from CEI was used to visualize the satellite data, using EnSight's texture mapping for the land masses and for the satellite curtain of data.

Link to: NASA article "NASA's CALIPSO Satellite Observes Volcanic Plume"

iPad Review: iPad contest reminder

2010-04-10T20:51:00.001-04:00

Remember you have until April 30 to submit your EnSight or EnSight CFd created image or animation for a chance to win an iPad. By the way all entries also receive a Starbucks $5 coffee card. So how can you go wrong?

What about an iPad review? Well we sat down Friday and this weekend and took a long look at an iPad and have some observations to share with you.

Executive summary: iPads are sweet. The large display (compared to iPhones and iPod Touch) makes them more compelling. Even though I have a MacBook laptop and an iPhone, I'm now trying to figure out how to justify buying one. For ibooks and as an alternative to a netbook, skipping on a Kindle, instead of a DS or Gameboy or some other handheld computer game, or for playing a Neflix instant view movie. Come to think of it there's plenty of uses for it. Budget beware. However, there are some issues that I hope are resolved so that I can enjoy it even more. Read on for details.

Books

iBooks are nice. I don't already have a Kindle and its now guaranteed that I never will. I might someday buy an e-book from Amazon for reading on my (future) iPad but I won't bother with their hardware device. I suspect even Amazon employees would agree. And I suspect they don't likely care as long as people keep buying books in paper or e-book form from them, even on the iPad. Using Apple's iBookstore was easy and there are plenty of free books there to explore the education and literature you may not have enjoyed already. Moby Dick, Jane Austin series, and all the others from the Gutenberg project are here for free to download and enjoy. No more paper books for me either. How quaint they'll seem in a few years.

Keynote

I'm a Keynote guy. I have to share my presentations in pdf or PowerPoint format with my colleagues, but I know that my Keynote presentations look better and the application is more natural than futzing with Powerpoint. So I was eager to try out Keynote on the iPad. Let me just say it was disappointing. That's mostly okay because if I travel I'm not likely to travel without my laptop where Keynote works great. And I can rehearse my presentation of Keynote on the plane with my iPad. But I won't be presenting with it, until Apple updates the software. The main problems are summarized here in a TUAW article. Unfortunately I had to experience these problems and then a friend pointed me to the article. So for now, don't buy a iPad in order to give a presentation next week. And Apple.... I consider my $9.99 payment for Keynote on iPad as a down payment on the version you plan to upgrade us all to.

Apparently Pages and Numbers also suffer like Keynote. Too bad because I'm big into Pages as well. Fortunately I haven't wasted any money on iPad Pages yet.

Games

Games are just darned fun. Some games that grew old on my iPhone are again enjoyable thanks to the larger screen. My 10 year old son Connor declared the iPad "awesome" and that's from a kid who is daily using his dad's old original iPhone as an iPod. He's now saving his money for one. We are spoiled in my family, everyone of the four of us has an iPhone or old iPhone or iPod, so we can't wait to try out the Scrabble application with the iPad where you use virtual tiles on your iPod/iPhone and the iPad works as the central game board. Sounds just like the Jetsons or Star Wars. We'll eat meal pills if Apple gets around to working on food. iEat or iMeal.

Projectors

Here like with Keynote I was disappointed. Because when I connect a projector via the docking cable, I would like to see either the whole screen or a "presenter mode" kind of screen on the projected screen and see a "presenter's view" on the iPad. That just doesn't happen. The iPad will become basically brain dead, showing a way to go forward or backward in a Keynote presentation or turn on a virtual laser pointer. But it doesn't show my presenter notes in Keynote. And in many applications it doesn't show anything at all on the iPad, relying entirely on the projected screen. And worst of all on some applications you just don't see anything. Now, stop and think about what happens on a laptop or a netbook when you connect and projector and you immediately notice the difference. The iPad is not going to be a collaboration/presentation tool until this gets fixed.

Google Docs viewed with Memeo Connect

Memeo gives me on my MacBook Pro laptop a way to view and edit my Google docs even when I'm not connected to the internet. Nice. So I was eager to try it out on the iPad version. My experience was that it worked but was so slow that it seemed to be awkward to use. I love the concept of being able to view my Google Docs while traveling, this would be nice for use on the plane. So I'm reserving judgement while I get more experience with Memeo Connect.

Okay so I've tested out the iPad and given you some more thoughts on the device. Will I buy one, sure, definitely, eventually, some time in 2010. But I'll also be thinking of it more like a Kindle/Game Machine than anything related to my work or presentation side of my life until Apple addresses the Keynote issues. And that's after only a few hours playing with it.

Again, the iPad is awesome. And worthy of your image or animation submission to win a free one.

Who wants it?

Open Foam Conference iPad Winner

2010-04-08T13:14:00.001-04:00

And the winner of the Apple iPad is Alex Rygg of Penn State University.

Congratulations Alex.

Alex's name was drawn at random from among those who attended the OpenFOAM Mid-Atlantic Users Conference. His iPad is still in shipping from Apple.

As a reminder there is a 2nd chance to win an Apple iPad. By submitting an image or animation to our image/animation contest. Also mentioned here. Contest entries accepted until the end of April.

Units coming to EnSight

2010-04-02T09:33:00.000-04:00

From time to time customers request the units capability in EnSight. They want to easily confirm that the right units are being displayed, include the units of the variable in a text annotation on the screen, convert units, etc.

I peaked into the development labs of CEI and found out that this is exactly what the developers are currently working on for EnSight.

Its not certain whether this will make it into the May release or the fall release of EnSight. But keep watching this post for further updates.

So far I have heard that important variables in the Fluent reader have been implemented. Sounds like good progress.

Want to win an iPad?

2010-03-30T18:08:00.001-04:00

Show us your EnSight or EnSight CFD skills. Pay off for you could be a shiny new Apple iPad.

That's right, we are riding Apple's coattails and giving away an iPad, because:

- that's one of the best ways to motivate our users to send us images and animations and tell us how they are using EnSight.
- we are psyched to have a native Cocoa Mac version of EnSight CFD.
- we seem to have an unusually high percentage of Mac customers (not complaining).
- iPads are way cool

So if you don't already have access to EnSight or EnSight CFD go to our website and download the free version (registration required).

Contest details:
http://www.ensight.com/2010-april-image-contest.html

Contest submissions end on April 30, 2010.

EnSight for Particle Visualization

2010-03-25T15:36:00.006-04:00

Users of BARRACUDA from CPFD Software LLC can now utilize the power and capability of EnSight to visualize, analyze and communicate their simulation results. Barracuda utilizes a computational particle fluid dynamic model to simulate fluid-particle flows and chemical reactions in industrial scale fluidization units.
EnSight's capability to visualize both the particles and volume domain, along with its ease of use in large transient models makes it an ideal choice for analyzing and understanding the operation, design, and optimization of these complex devices.
Check out more at : http://www.ensight.com/barracuda-visualization.html

EnSight 9.1.1b now available - the DR is in.

2010-03-19T16:38:00.000-04:00

Following on the successful launch of EnSight 9.1, which we blogged about here, There is a bug fix version, 9.1.1b, now available for download from our website.

The primary changes were in HPC functionality found in server-of-servers (S.O.S) and Distributed Rendering (DR).

Major new features of EnSight 9.1 include:

Volume Rendering.
Surface Rendering using transparency channel in the color palette.
Session Files, enhanced over context files to increase reusability of work over multiple datasets.
Welcome screen which with session files will speed access to current projects.
New readers for FEA: IDEAS and Ansys Autodyn.
AcuSolve reader from Acusim now included in the distribution.

Enhancements to EnSight 9.1 include:

Improved palette editor which also supports volume and surface rendering.
Support for polyhedral models in Fluent direct reader.
Reduction in memory use for models using polyhedral elements by 40% (your mileage may vary)
And many others...

The changes in 9.1.1b are listed below. This is not the exhaustive list.

EnSight Client

Alpha volume scale is not recorded to command file or session file.

Right click on iso -> Change Value does not work

Format description is now shown in file dialog in the "Comments area.

QIA continually refreshes

Editing annotation text with embedded variable references can crash EnSight

Crash while playing back a script that enables S/T textures while a part is potentially colored with limit fringes

Variable being activated when color editor comes up

Dismissing the Map-Varaiable to existing case dialog with out mapping any variables when adding a 2nd overflow dataset crashes EnSight

Viewport-visibility for volume rendering turns off volumes

Color bands overlap with partial range

Palette editor shows wrong colors with banding

Python exception while editing palette nodes

Bug in file selector for File -> Export -> Geometric Entities

Multiple error dialogs pop up on Windows

Client crash due to creating curved vector arrows resulting in 0 points

Visual symmetry for volume parts does not work

OSX hardware picking failed with ATI HD 4xxx cards

Animated particle traces colored by a variable with a non-white constant color display incorrectly

Cone transformation dialog

Right click menus don't record part selection

Creating curved vector arrows on Xclip of nfaced dataset crashes ensight

HSV colors shown wrong

No warning/error if no variables exist when using right-click on vector operations when no vector variables exist.

Variable names with a colon in them can cause trouble in a command file.

Mac client tries to start X11 even in software batch

High-lighting preferences were not always being honored

Trying to do volume rendering with a model that has both tets and nfaced elements hangs.

Vector arrows on point elements, vectors would not be created.

Crash when context file data cannot be found

Command dialog python panel not handling blank lines

Axis triad is covered by volumes

File > Open default for new case/session different on Win64&32 and Linux

Error dialog clamped to primary screen

Line and plane tool defined by node id's when change timesteps

Preferences dialog doesn't allow -1 to be specified for -timeout

Allow joysticks/game controllers to manipulate basic transforms

Click n go clip planes can be colored incorrectly while manipulating

EnSight Server

Crinkly clip of nfaced elements crashes server

Feature angle artifacts in models with nfaced polys

Holes in clips of n-faced elements

Can get a crash when moving a clip plane along a spline (or probably whenever you have a moving clip plane that keeps getting re-computed.)

Default for using ghosts in border algorithm with auto-distribute incorrect

Computing elem-to-node variable using (default) across averaging computes in-correct values.

Element ids on clip planes not being shown

(2D) point part did not mesh (via qhull) due to tagged as 3D part.

EnSight Server of Servers (S0S)

Various SOS fixes

Fixed a crash with the exodus reader and temporally decomposed datasets

XDMF2 files that use raw binary I/O to external files can fail.

Exodus reader can now autodetect temporal decomposition from filenames

XDMF files with polyline elements and multi-dimensional connectivity arrays fail

Default SOS autodistribute open not set properly in the GUI with case sos files

Contours with SoS

EnLiten

If only viewers are installed on win64, they cannot launch via desktop icons

Can't restore an enliten file with > 10 animated particle trace parts

Displaying old enliten files sometimes fails

Saving large volumes to Enliten may crash

EnSight DR

Grid display with EnSight DR

Keyframe animation does not work with EnSight DR

Click-n-go of a clip plane hangs EnSight DR

Changing the particle emitter gridding of a plane emitter in EnSight DR hangs EnSight

Sincerely,

Computational Engineering International (CEI), developers of EnSight

Shanghai Office Launches Chinese EnSight website

2010-03-16T10:56:00.001-04:00

Response to CEI's creation of a Shanghai office has been excellent. We are able to visit customers, partners, and distributors throughout Asia on a weekly basis. Customers are getting one on one instruction and tips on EnSight directly from CEI and CEI-trained personnel. And all this has happened only since November when we sent Aric and his family on their mission.

Congratulations to Aric Meyer and his team over at EnSight.com.cn on the launch of their website.

Sayonara to EnSight 9.0 Develoment

2010-02-25T17:36:00.001-05:00

Version 9.0.3(e) of EnSight is on it's way out to the world. This is the last update of EnSight 9.0, which includes 34 bug fixes since 9/2009.

For most customers, upgrading to 9.1 should be the preferred path. For customers with larger installations that are more difficult to transition, they may consider using this release as an interim to a full 9.1 release upgrade. Everything that is fixed in 9.0 is also fixed in 9.1, in addition to the many feature enhancements and more bug fixes. The only current limitation in 9.1 is DR support, which will be resolved for the first 9.1 update in a week or two.

Support for 9.0 going forward will be geared toward work-arounds and fixes provided through 9.1.

EnSight 9.0 was released in November 2008 and customers can continue to use it with support from CEI and our international sales partners.

MacWorld welcomes EnSight

2010-02-13T19:53:00.001-05:00

Well we are here at MacWorld in San Francisco. The number of exhibitors is down and Apple isn't here but that didn't hurt our experience. We had several customers visit the booth including some from NASA Ames, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Naval Post-graduate School, Stanford, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Penguin Computing, and more. And a slew of interest in the Cocoa Mac version of EnSight CFD which was released last week.

What was also nice was a story about CEI and EnSight CFD, and my past life as a NASA Mac user, blogged up by "The Apple Core". Go check it out.

New Mac CFD product, Caedium

2010-02-10T13:51:00.001-05:00

Most CFD users use Linux, followed by Windows, and a small number use Macs.

There's a new offering, Caedium from Symscape, which lets Mac users who want to learn CFD do so.

This is not a replacement for Fluent or Star-CD or STAR-CCM or AcuSolve or any of the myriad of super powerful CFD tools which are available from government labs or industry.

Caedium is a CFD environment from end to end. Its solver inside is OpenFOAM. And its priced at $1000 and less, depending on the option. It reads geometry, or lets you create geometry, mesh, apply boundary conditions, solve in OpenFOAM, and visualize the results in Caedium's post-processing. Caedium also exports to EnSight format (and some other 3rd party post-processors) for improved post-processing.

So if you are on a Mac, and want to use OpenFOAM or more generically just want to learn CFD, check out Caedium. It won't break the bank.

Side by Side Animations

2010-02-10T13:00:00.001-05:00

There was a recent request in from a user:
I have two models, and I have post processed them the same. I have similar animations from each result. What I'd really like to do, is to paste the animations in a side-by-side mode so that there is a new single combined animation which show the two results side by side.

Now, in most video editors, you can only paste front to back, end of one movie to the start of the next. Well, not EnVe. You can paste side by side, or top/bottom, or diagonal, etc.

Read here for more on how and to see the movie.

Customer Survey for 9.1 and beyond

2010-02-03T13:50:00.000-05:00

Now that EnSight 9.1 has been released and you've had a chance to look over the website, pdf, download it and take it for a spin, maybe you'd like to give us some feedback.

Its a short survey, less than 10 questions long and all pertinent to serving you our customers better.

We are giving away some gifts to the first people who fill out the survey. While our limited supplies last.

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/234512/ensight-9-1-release-survey

Thanks for your time and your input.

EnSight 9.1 now available

2010-01-28T13:53:00.000-05:00

We are happy to inform you that EnSight 9.1 is now available for download from our website, www.ensight.com. EnSight is the leading tool for CFD and CAE data visualization and post-processing, possessing capacity and features not found anywhere else.

Major new features of EnSight 9.1 include:

Volume Rendering.
Surface Rendering using transparency channel in the color palette.
Session Files, enhanced over context files to increase reusability of work over multiple datasets.
Welcome screen which with session files will speed access to current projects.
New readers for FEA: IDEAS and Ansys Autodyn.
AcuSolve reader from Acusim now included in the distribution.

Enhancements to EnSight 9.1 include:

Improved palette editor which also supports volume and surface rendering.
Support for polyhedral models in Fluent direct reader.
Reduction in memory use for models using polyhedral elements by 40% (your mileage may vary)
And many others...

Volume Rendering is an exciting new capability. For the first time in a major CFD/CAE post-processing tool you'll be able to peer into the 3D domain and see the velocity, pressure, stress, temperature field all at one time. Our interactive palette editor makes exploring the domain to find the most interesting features easy and intuitive.

Volume Rendering of a plunging-style mixer.

This feature is available in all versions of EnSight, so that all customers can benefit from it. Finally, you can use volume rendering immersed with traditional visualization techniques such as streamlines and isosurfaces and clip planes, etc.

Learning how to use Volume Rendering in EnSight 9.1 is quite easy. Watch this short screencast.
Volume Rendering: Getting Started (1 minute)

This screencast covers the new color palette editor, which includes the settings for the volume rendering palettes.

Volume Rendering is intensive visualization process. So it requires a modern powerful graphics card. See our previous blog posting for some description of the graphics memory required.

We strongly recommend that you take the time to read the Release Notes that are included, these will provide you with an exhaustive overview of the new features and improvements.

Sincerely,

Computational Engineering International (CEI), developers of EnSight

EnSight 9.1 Volume Rendering - how to prepare

2010-01-20T13:44:00.000-05:00

Volume Rendering in EnSight 9.1 is going to require a fair bit of VRAM, video memory. Our development team is hard at work adding features, tweaking performance, and reducing memory on this feature right now so its hard to say how much memory will be needed per millions of cells or elements. And of course that would depend on some of the actions you take during your EnSight session.

Regardless, you are going to need a graphics card produced in the last 2 years. Volume rendering requires a DirectX 10 compatible nVidia or ATI graphics card, not that EnSight uses DirectX but this is an indicator for the correct generation of graphics cards.

Volume rendering will use significantly more memory on the client, both for storing the volume cell data as well as rendering objects to be passed to the graphics card. These rendering objects also consume memory on the graphics card. An estimate for graphics memory required for running EnSight 9.1 includes:

40MB EnSight with opaque surfaces

64MB EnSight with semi-transparent surfaces (depth peeling)

110MB EnSight with volume rendering

Due to OpenGL limitations on Mac OS X, these numbers are 67MB, 91MB, and 137MB when running the EnSight client on a Mac.

This includes the screen itself, our rendering buffers, depth peeling buffers, and volume peeling buffers. This is assuming a graphics window size of 1024x720 and the default of 6 peels. Memory requirements will increase for larger displays or more peels. This is just an entry level point before any geometry is rendered.

EnSight 9.1 Volume Rendering in 1 Minute

2010-01-18T09:19:00.000-05:00

Everybody is busy these days. No one has any spare time. So its nice to see that a 1 minute tutorial is all that it takes to get a taste for the new volume rendering coming from EnSight 9.1.

This 1 minute tutorial by Kevin Colburn. Has a link at the end for a longer version which gives more advanced usage.

EnSight 9.1 is slated to release next week. Of course if that date proves to be solid you'll read about it here. (EnSight 9.1 is available as of Jan 25 2010)

For more information on EnSight 9.1.

Volume Rendering from EnSight 9.1

2010-01-15T11:27:00.001-05:00

EnSight 9.1 will usher in the era of CFD post-processing using volume rendering by being the first mainstream commercial CAE post-processing application to offer this feature.

Starting to get some images coming from beta testers of EnSight 9.1. The following come from CEI's Houston Office, Kevin Colburn.

Volume rendering of vorticity generated from a simulation of the rotors of a helicopter. EnSight 9.1's Volume rendering capability was used here to visualize this complex vorticity field.

This front view not only illustrates the vortex structure of the rotor, but also the flow around the body.

This rear view helps illustrate the vortex development from the rear tail rotor as well as
the influence with the body.

To see more like this go to Kevin's gallery of EnSight images.

CEI is indicating that the release of EnSight 9.1 is now scheduled for January 25, which is just over a 10 days away.

Simulated Fish Bend Under Pressure

2009-12-31T10:06:00.003-05:00

Development continues on a program that simulates fish passage through a dam’s hydroturbine. The program now causes the fish to bend due to forces produced by the rushing water. The picture shows a fish that has just hit a wicket gate and is subject to bending forces as it bounces off. The turbine calculation was provided by Voith Hydro and the image was generated using EnSight.

Smoother Isosurfaces in EnSight 9.1

2009-12-23T11:23:00.001-05:00

Sneak Preview before Christmas. From one of our anonymous developers of EnSight on a nice goodie added to EnSight 9.1.

Top image is of the original isosurface computed by EnSight. Accurate but not as nice for making posters and marketing materials.

Bottom image. Less accurate but smoother for better marketing images.

Some of you know I have been working on a little
side feature for awhile now and finally got around
to "finishing" it. There is a math function now
called "SmoothMesh". It takes 2D part(s) as input
and computes a "smoother" mesh using a multi-pass
spring model. The output of SmoothMesh is a vector
variable that you apply to the original part as
a displacement field. I have attached an image
of a computed shock on the shroud dataset that I
smoothed this way (upper viewport is the original,
lower is the smoothed form). In the example, I
used 100 passes with a weighting factor of 0.05.

variables: evaluate SmoothMesh = SmoothMesh(plist,100,0.05)

More passes increases the smoothing and the weighting
factor controls how fast the solution "converges".
It is interesting to look at the wireframe before
and after to see that it effective "normalizes"
polygon sizes. Two notes:

1) this is a "soap bubble" style algorithm, so it
tends to minimize surface area over time and it
"shrinks".

2) instead of a fixed weighting factor (0.05), you
can pass a nodal variable that allows for a spatially
varying weighting so you can smooth regions of a mesh,
keeping other areas fixed.

The function is fully threaded and much quicker in Gold than Std on
my system. Anyway, give it a try (if you are using EnSight 9.1 or the beta test version).

Thanks.

Shanghai Aric arrives in Shanghai

2009-12-01T09:55:00.000-05:00

We have two Eric's at CEI. When someone calls for Eric or Aric I've heard people respond "E" or "A"?

"E" Eric O'Connell works here for both Accounting and Sales. For Sales he's contacting academic prospects and telling them about EnSight CFD.

"A" Aric Meyer started with us mid summer as a graduate intern of NC State University. His task was to convince us of the growth potential for CEI in Asia. He did his job so well we decided to send him to Asia.

And so here we are. As of this morning he's arrived in Shanghai with a contract to go out and sell EnSight, help Asian distributors sell EnSight.

This is Aric in front of the high-speed Maglev train that takes you from the Shanghai's Pudong International Airport to downtown Shanghai at a maximum operating speed of 267.8 miles/hour. This is the first commercial maglev train in the world. This was taken during a trip this summer to Asia to meet customers and introduce himself to distributors in the region.

Here's where Shanghai is on the map.

According to Wikipedia, there are over 20 million people living in Shanghai, so at least a few of them should need EnSight.

If you want to learn more about Shanghai, a good place to start is with the Shanghai Wikipedia page.

We've asked Aric to tell us more about Aric in this blog as he goes about the region finding out what China needs for data visualization.

Good luck Aric and tell us about China. For starters maybe you can tell us about the two very obviously interesting buildings that make the Shanghai skyline so unique.

Which Radii are More Dangerous to Fish?

2009-11-11T13:26:00.003-05:00

The image depicts a simulated fish passing near a turbine blade. A program that uses Computational Fluid Dynamics to estimate the fish’s path is currently being developed. This fish was lucky - it didn’t hit the blade. When the program is completed, we can determine where fish are likely to hit the blades and then develop ways to keep fish out of these areas. The turbine calculation was provided by Voith Hydro and the image was generated using EnSight.

Is CEI collapsing?

2009-10-21T13:11:00.001-04:00

Apparently the rumor mill a few months ago was saying that the developers at CEI who were working on Volume Rendering were leaving the company.

I have no explanation for this rumor, perhaps the rumormongers will have to chime in. My guess is that when you are having problems competing with people you start to spread rumors about them. We didn't know about this rumor until we started talking about our Volume Rendering progress and approaching release of EnSight 9.1. I think that our progress in Volume Rendering had started to rattle some people's cages.

I guess to add fuel to my rebuttal, we'd like to welcome our newest employee, Dave Bremer.

Dave is joining the Development team. He comes to us from Lawrence Livermore National Labs. Before that he was educated at Brown University with a Master's of Computer Science, and a Bachelor's of Computer Science and Math at Concordia University-River Forest.

And for those keeping track, no government stimulus money was used to induce CEI to hire another employee to North Carolina.

Do you like to vote on things? HPCwire

2009-10-20T13:34:00.000-04:00

HPCwire issues their "Reader's Choice Awards Survey". The awards are given out at SuperComputing. CEI was certainly proud to receive an award in the past for EnSight Gold one year and EnSight Lite another year.

If you'd like to vote EnSight CFD, the product introduction we made this year, that'd be great. We recommend you put it in the category of "Best use of HPC application in manufacturing" since CFD and EnSight are usually in this category, from among the choices (no sense in your vote getting 'wasted' in the wrong category).

Best of HPC Contest Survey

By the way, at SuperComputing we are having a Birds of a Feather meeting (BOF) (public welcome) on Tuesday night and Customer dinner (by invitation) on Wednesday evening. Email Kevin Colburn if you'd like an invitation to the customer dinner. kevin at ensight.com

CEI Opening International Office in Munich

2009-10-19T10:41:00.000-04:00

CEI Opens International Office in Munich to Better Serve the Central, Northern, and Eastern European Market

APEX, N.C., October 15, 2009 — Raimund Schweiger, a mechanical engineer and specialist in computer-aided engineering (CAE), computer-aided design (CAD), and product lifecycle management (PLM) with more than three decades of experience, has joined CEI to head the company’s first international office in Munich, Germany. Raimund will be the branch manager responsible for new and existing accounts throughout Germany, Austria, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Scandinavia, Finland Denmark, and Eastern Europe. Best-known for its industry-leading suite of EnSight software, CEI offers is a developer of simulation software and offers a range of applications for the scientific and engineering community, including tools for data visualization and plotting, communicating 3D results, and creating animations.

Schweiger, a graduate of Technical University Munich in mechanical engineering, comes to CEI from TechnoStar Europe GmbH, where he served as the managing director. He also served as a Managing Director and Co-founder of CAEvolution GmbH, Director of European Marketing at MSC Software GmbH, Manager of MSC Software France, and a Numerical Analyst at BMW AG. Schweiger has an extensive knowledge of virtual product engineering (CAE, FEA) in European aerospace, automotive, and defense industries.

“Schweiger’s extensive knowledge of the European market as well as his engineering background in aerospace, automotive and defense made him the best candidate for this position. We already have numerous EnSight users in central, northern, and eastern Europe, but we are exited to grow our customer base through the direct face-to-face contact Raimund will provide,” says vice president of sales & marketing, Darin McKinnis.

CEI plans to offer its entire suite of EnSight products in the region. The Munich office has great potential, according to McKinnis. This new office will allow CEI to further relationships with existing clients in northern Europe, such as Airbus, Volkswagen, Daimler, Audi, BMW Sauber, Robert Bosch, and Volvo.

The office location is planned to be:

CEI GmbH
gate Garchinger Technologie- und Gründerzentrum GmbH
Lichtenbergstraße 8
85748 Garching bei München
Raimund Schweiger
Branch Manager
raimund.schweiger@ensight.com
Phone +49-89- 37 48 91 44
Mobile +49-172- 8646988
Website: http://www.ensight.com/munich-office.html

CEI GmbH of Munich will begin accepting orders for EnSight software and customer support as of January 2010, and is currently providing quotes for 2010 services and software.

There is a current job position open, in Garching bei Munchen, for a technical support person.

Isn't it cool that CEI now has an office in Detroit, Houston, Munich, and by early next year Shanghai? Plus distributor partners in Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Sydney, and others.

Engineous Isight, CEI EnSight, MSC.Patran and Insight confusion

2009-10-18T20:13:00.000-04:00

Blogging is a great way to get some information out there that just can't seem to get any traction. At least with blogging you know the information is on the internet and might just possibly take on a life of its own.

Here's a tidbit that has dogged me for several years. People at tradeshows and conferences constantly confuse our product with some similarly named products in the industry. Its bad enough there are other EnSight things like oil companies and other CEI companies like the local one that services photocopiers and printers. I'm talking about products which are also in the MCAE industry and have some relation to post-processing of results. So here's a run-down, and I'll admit right now that I'll probably have to edit this post in the future as my audience points out ones I missed.

CEI EnSight - our friend the general purpose post-processor of CFD, FEA, crash, combustion, electromagnetics, FSI, and multi-physics data. Famous for handling large data and its amazing interactivity with large data.

Engineous iSight - the company Engineous is located nearby to us in Cary, NC and was bought last year by Dassault Systemes so they are part of the Simulia Group. This Simulia Group also contains the Abaqus FEA product. EnSight reads Abaqus results, from their .fil and .odb files. That's why we go to Simulia conferences and user group meetings to show off EnSight. iSight is a product which enables you to run many, many runs of your solver, for example Abaqus and get some optimization by comparing the runs. iSight and EnSight are not competitors. In Japan people have hooked together iSight and EnSight, a story I hope to tell you about in another posting.

MSC.Patran and InSight. InSight is a visualization module which was bolted onto MSC.Patran for many years. I believe Patran no longer includes this module. However since Insight was supposed to make Patran better for post-processing many people are confused about Insight and EnSight. EnSight can read data from several MSC products including Dytran (MSC.Dytran), Marc (MSC.Marc), Nastran (MSC.Nastran or MD Nastran), and ADAMS (MSC.ADAMS) and combinations of these like Dytran coupled with Adams. EnSight is the only tool able to visualize such solver combinations, though I suspect MSC would like to make SimXpert do that some day. Further confusing the issue is that for awhile SimXpert was embedding some technology from CEI, some of our Apex technology. Some people at MSC became misinformed and passed along misinformed information that "EnSight was embedded in SimXpert". This was simply not the case. I think the rumor had legs because people wanted to have EnSight's capabilities available to them in SimXpert. Those customers just need to just buy EnSight.

Okay I hope that sorted it out for somebody out there.

EnSight 9.0.3c faster, better, and reads more data

2009-10-17T00:29:00.001-04:00

We are pleased to announce the release of EnSight 9.0.3c.

This version of EnSight includes:
- improved readers for Fluent, Star-CD .ccm, LS-Dyna, Tecplot, Nastran, CTH, and Marc files.
- new readers for Airpak and Icepak from ANSYS
- faster rendering of particles
- many bug fixes
This is not a feature release (the previous release in June was 9.0.3b).

The next major release is expected to be EnSight 9.1 and is not expected until January, 2010.

EnSight 9.1 will feature volume rendering. See an example from EnSight below. If people request it I will post the movie from which this image was taken to show the dynamic nature of our Volume Rendering.

Subscribe to the email newsletter.

EnSight 9.0.3c much faster for particles on Windows

2009-10-16T16:38:00.000-04:00

I've been pushing to make EnSight better for DEM models like those from DEM-Solution's EDEM code. For one reason because EnSight is already so good at post-processing EDEM data.

Another reason is that many people are coupling EDEM with CFD codes like Fluent and FEA codes like Adams, Dytran, Marc, and ANSYS to perform multiphysics analysis. EnSight can load data from EDEM and the same time the data from these other programs, as well as from CAD programs like Catia, Unigraphics, Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks and others. For example see this compilation video on Youtube.

One problem though was with particle rendering. It was slow on Windows. Fortunately our EnSight development team came up with a fix for this and put it into 9.0.3(c).

EnSight 9.0.3(c) with the faster particle rendering in Windows is now released. You can download it from our website. This is many, many times (like 100x) faster for particle rendering on Windows.

If you'd like to be automatically informed about future product releases you might want to sign up for our email newsletter.

EnSight 9.0.3(c) - client, server, SOS & DR and enliten

2009-10-16T10:44:00.001-04:00

Here is the list of what is new in EnSight, 9.0.3c.

EnSight 9.0.3c is a bug fix release. This is not intended as a "new features" release. New features will be coming in EnSight 9.1 which is scheduled for a November release. In that version you will find the new Volume Rendering, Welcome Screen, Session Files and more.

Here's what is improved with the client, server, server-of-servers (sos) and the free EnLiten 3D viewer. In our previous post we talked about what is new in the readers.

EnSight Client

EnSight Server

EnLiten

EnSight Gold and EnSight DR, including SOS

EnSight 9.0.3(c) - improved and new readers

2009-10-15T12:52:00.003-04:00

What we've all been waiting for, the latest version of EnSight, 9.0.3c. Reminder that this is primarily a bug fix and reader release, not designed to have new features.

We're going to be blogging on this new version for the next few days.

Here's what is new in the area of data readers. Go here to read about what bugs were squished in this release.

CFD Readers

Avus reader update
Airpak files now read by Fluent Reader
Fluent reader now reads IcePak files

Fluent reader now reads Airpak files
Fluent reader now reads CAS files in ASCII format

IcePak files now read by Fluent reader
Star CCM files read properly

FEA, Crash, and other non-CFD Readers

CTH reader reads files larger than 2GB
CTH reader reads CTH 9 spcth data
CTH reader SOS doesn't skip blocks if more servers than files

LS-DYNA reader backup /restore is fixed
LS-DYNA reader now includes variables when SPH data is present
LS-DYNA reader now properly removes deleted SPH elements

Tecplot ASCII reader no longer crashes for very long filename
Tecplot ASCII reader now handles degenerate quad elems (triangles or bars)

Marc reader is now more robust
Nastran Input file reader now handles continuation lines

The previous version, 9.0.3(b) was released in early June, 2009.

Japan v2009.10.02

2009-10-08T13:38:00.011-04:00

Greetings from a new member of the CEI sales team. I joined CEI this year, with my primary role to establish a regional office in Asia. In that vein I presented EnSight 9.1 and EnSight CFD 1.2 to the Japan Visualization Conference and EnSight Forum in Tokyo this past week.

After a week of visiting current and future EnSight customers and getting to know our distributors in Japan, WaveFront and KGT, I finished the trip with the EnSight Forum on Friday.

The small demo room was packed with technology. In addition to CAE software and high-end computing hardware vendors, there was an 8-panel stereo LCD display showing a museum-quality human anatomy video, and 2 sets of augmented reality hardware. One package allowed users to manipulated models of the sun, earth, moon, and space shuttle. Two LCD screens then showed the scene from the space shuttle’s and the earth’s perspectives. The other setup was an array of video cameras that determined the orientation of a real-life object and displayed a model of it in 3D on a computer screen.

Of interest to me were two Open-GL hijacking products. A local visualization company was showing off a distributed rendering multi-panel display wall system. Software running on the main computer captured the 3D Open-GL information of whatever software was running, The scene was then split up and sent via ethernet to multiple computers, which in turn output their images to 9 46” Samsung LCD screens. We tested the system with EnSight. With EnLiten running on the main computer, the identical view was rendered seamlessly over the display wall.

Another Open-GL hack is a software package by KGT which can combine data from various Open-GL applications interactively. In the demo that was set up was capturing a CAD model from Catia running on one computer and displaying it in Maya on another computer. The program is strangely-yet-aptly-named ‘3D Chimera-GL.’ It is an interesting idea. Chimera does work with EnSight, but I am unsure how one would make use of it. Any ideas? Learn more about it on this automated translation of KGT’s webpage.

Watch for more news from me about our coming office in Shanghai, China.

Oktoberfest and EnSight

2009-10-08T10:45:00.000-04:00

I noted back a month ago about Germans eating Python, turns out from my visit to Germany that they much prefer chicken (Hertl), pork, sausages of many kinds, veal and other yummy things. And of course beer. It was my opportunity to take in the very famous Oktoberfest, held each year in Munich.

Fortunately Raimund, branch manager of our German Office, knows that this is a must do" activity for visitors to Munich in late September and early October (the date has shifted earlier to leverage better weather).

In fact when I entered Germany, the fellow at passport control asked me "purpose of the visit, business or pleasure?" I told him it was "business" he looked at me, grinned and said "jah sure, Oktoberfest" and passed back my passport. Who was I to argue with him?

In real life I'm not a real beer drinker. But when at Oktoberfest it just feels like you are insulting the whole country and culture to order a Coca-Cola. So I kept my Coke order in check and had a Mass Beer like the rest of the crowd. I can't tell you it was tasty, like I said, I'm no judge of beer taste and I don't really care for the taste of beer overall. But when in Rome...

Yes, that's a big beer and a heavy glass.

Here's what it looks like in one of these many beer halls lining the streets of the Oktoberfest grounds.

Keep in mind that this hall is full and its only noon on Friday. These people might be here the rest of the day and into the night. By then the mood will be very, very, hearty and lubricated.

So, in the end what is Oktoberfest? My take on it is that Oktoberfest is one part state fair, one part tradeshow for beer enthusiasts, and 1 part get together with your friends.

It does seem safe for the kids. In fact apparently Oktoberfest is drilled into the minds of kids at a young age.

These kids were getting a lecture on the pros and cons of LowenBrau or some other brand of beer when we passed by. Notice the four kids on the left who have found their own preferred brand beer hall.

If you get a chance be sure to check it out.

CEI's office in Munich (actually Garching bei Munchen) is about 30 minutes drive from the Oktoberfest grounds. Located at the Garching Gate alongside the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the GE Global Research Center of Europe.

If you are a Munchen resident in the CAE industry, you might be interested in our open position for Technical Support Engineer.

Development Underway to Simulate Fish Passage through Hydroturbines

2009-10-06T09:58:00.003-04:00

Development continues on a program designed to simulate a fish traveling through a hydroturbine. In order to design fish-friendly turbines, it is important to know which “danger” areas fish are likely to enter and when the fish might hit vanes or blades. Using the node track option in EnSight, I can track the path of the fish. The image shows the path of a simulated fish as it passes through a draft tube (the outlet portion of the dam right under the turbine blades). The draft tube calculation was provided by Voith Hydro and the image was generated using EnSight.

Some people have a knack for some things

2009-09-05T09:06:00.000-04:00

There are only 3 people, of all those who have tried, who have solved my difficult golf ball on the golf tee aquarium toy that I keep near the door for my office visitors to enjoy.

I'm keeping track now because this is getting ridiculous. They are:

Dan Schikore - VP of Engineering here at CEI
Clovis Maliska - President and head of Development at ESSS in Brazil
and Connor McKinnis - my son and head of development at Lego building at the McKinnis home, also chief tester of Wii game machine endurance and game playability, also chief borrower of my iphone.

Question 1: does this bode well for the development skills of my son? I hope so.

Question 2: So what makes these three people uniquely able to solve the golf tee bubble thing? Because each of them has not simply done it once but they've each done it several times, with apparently as much effort as it takes me to eat a good cheeseburger.

Something to ponder. Is anyone else noticing these strange people in our midst with odd abilities?

Connor, with the golf tee bubble he solved again last weekend.

EnSight on Snow Leopard

2009-09-04T15:39:00.000-04:00

Do you want the good news or the bad news?

Okay first the good news. Yes, EnSight runs on Snow Leopard.

Now the bad news. EnSight 9.0.3(b) and earlier start out looking for Mac OS 10.5 which is Leopard, so when Snow Leopard says its 10.6 EnSight doesn't like that. So you have to set an environment variable to fix this until EnSight 9.0.3(c) is released. The work around is detailed in this Knowledgebase Solution: http://www.ensight.com/getFAQ/462

Now the even better news. EnSight is much faster in Snow Leopard. Really this credit goes to Apple. They fixed a problem that made Leopard go slower than Panther, and Snow Leopard goes faster again than Leopard. So one more reason to upgrade to Leopard.

That's above what we call a bad news sandwiched between good news. Bon Appetit.

More Smoke and Fog coming this Fall

2009-09-02T10:00:00.001-04:00

The forecast for EnSight this fall is increased visualization of smoke, fog, body organs, storms, and supernova. Not to worry this will all happen with no loss of life and no injuries besides carpel tunnel.

EnSight customers can look forward to Volume Rendering coming this fall in EnSight 9.1. EnSight 9.1 is expected to be released to customers in November.

An example of Volume rendering is shown below in an image found on the website of LBL by Elena Caraba. http://vis.lbl.gov/~elena/Projects/Advection/index.html This image was not created with EnSight.

Volume rendering is a great way to visualize flow and structures in 3D models where the boundaries are not obvious. Great examples are organs in our bodies, clouds in the sky, heat patterns in flames, and turbulence in the flow of air or the flow of plasma in the stars.

The downsides to Volume rendering have been
a) not available in robust commercial software like EnSight
b) computationally expensive requiring supercomputer-like power
c) therefore restricted to users like government and academic viz researchers.

Thanks to vast improvements in computing power via modern processors and especially graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA volume rendering on typical desktops is feasible now.

This fall CEI EnSight will include Volume Rendering and on Friday CEI staff enjoyed a sneak peak.

VP of Development, Dan Schikore is shown demonstrating volume rendering model to some staff in the weekly staff meeting. Earlier in the meeting another developer, Mike Krogh, demonstrated the user interface for controlling the color palette of volume rendered scenes.

Marketing is usually responsible for smoke and mirrors at CEI, but this summer and fall the increased smoke is coming from graphics cards and the offices of the creative development team of EnSight.

Viz Worth Watching Closes an Era

2009-08-31T10:45:00.000-04:00

Photo of Amanda's going away party Friday night at Ander's house.

Monday August 31, 2009 - Today is Amanda Baley's last day working for CEI. Amanda launched this blog, Viz Worth Watching, a few months ago with a vision for speaking to customers, prospects, families, and friends of CEI in an informal and friendly way. We will miss her at CEI and in this blog. The website, www.ensight.com remains the official serious side of CEI. Viz Worth Watching will remain the stream of consciousness version. The Robin Williams irreverent but loyal version.

Amanda worked at CEI from July 2005 to August 31, 2009 as Marketing Coordinator and then rising to Marketing Manager. Amanda was employee #2 in the Sales and Marketing Group, before it expanded to remote offices. Today that group has offices in Detroit, Houston, Munich, and coming soon Shanghai. Expansion made possible in part due to Amanda's tireless efforts in promoting CEI and EnSight.

Amanda is moving on in order to focus on a key project, working with a single client who she secured last year in a nearby hospital. This client is very demanding and yet rewards her in ways CEI can not compete with. Her client is destined for wonderful things and Amanda is committed to being a foundational part of that start up. Good luck to Amanda, Chris her husband, and their daughter, Samantha, her client.

German Engineers Devour Python this Fall at Octoberfest

2009-08-28T21:37:00.001-04:00

Python is a powerful programming language, the hot new thing for engineers, scientists and programmers. Its got a huge community of developers. And EnSight uses Python in a lot of really interesting ways. So at CEI we are big Python fans. And our customers are becoming big Python fans. The phrase heard around here a lot is, "you can do that with Python?"

Apparently Python is really, really big in Germany. This fall in Germany there are going to be quite a few Python training classes being held. One in particular titled Python for Scientists and Engineers might be especially suited to EnSight users. Training is scheduled for October 17-18 in Leipzig.

For other events, see PythonEvents at http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEvents

If you want to see if Python is all that, head over to www.python.org.

If you want to learn Python, there are a huge number of books available at your local bookstore. One option is "Dive into Python" which is available for free in html, pdf, and other formats, as well as available for purchase from Amazon in traditional tree-slaying format (paper).

In a future posting I'll mention a Python book for kids to learn programming, if I get any requests in the blog comments.

Google SketchUp Pro, Google 3D Warehouse and EnSight

2009-08-27T10:12:00.000-04:00

Google SketchUp Pro can be a useful tool for users of EnSight.

I often want to load simulation models and then add some context to the scene. For example, if I have a cell phone drop test, then want to add a person to the scene, lets call him Mr. ButterFingers, to show the context of a drop test. The simulation is usually done with an explicit FEA code, like ABAQUS Explicit, MSC Dytran, LS-Dyna, or ADINA, starting just millimeters above the ground to save computing time. The idea is, there's no sense in dropping a cell phone 5 feet through the air by these simulation codes, that's just hours of wasted computing time. EnSight's keyframe animation can replicate the original dropping of the cell phone by Herr ButterFingers over that initial distance in seconds. Okay EnSight can add a useful animation to a drop test, what does that have to do with Google SketchUp and 3D Warehouse?

EnSight already has direct CAD readers available for sale. So if you have CATIA, Pro/Engineer, Solidworks, or another CAD formatted file for your context, then simply license the CAD reader from CEI and you are all set. Or export a model from those CAD packages in .SL or OBJ format. However, if you don't have CAD models for the context then Googles 3D Warehouse and Google SketchUp Pro are a handy addition. Just download and install Google SketchUp and from the File Menu choose 3D Warehouse. Search for the kind of model that will serve as your context. For example maybe you work on oil rig drill bits and don't have a model of an oil rig in your company CAD system. Where are you going to get an oil rig model to show how the drill bit fits into the whole big process?

Here I searched 3D Warehouse for and found an Oil Rig model.

For our Mr. ButterFingers cell phone example, by default there's a man in SketchUp, so you don't even need to load anything for that guy to drop a cell phone for you.

The remaining problem is in exporting file formats. The common format that EnSight can read from Google SketchUp at this time is only OBJ. And you can only get OBJ from Google SketchUp Pro version. This costs $495. But you can first do an 8 hour trial from Google. From the Pro version select File Export & 3D Geometry. And export to OBJ format. Be sure to include facets. And don't bother including Textures. EnSight OBJ reader doesn't support Textures yet.

Then read the file into EnSight. Color as desired. Presto you have context for your model. Go back and pay for the Pro version, because that was useful wasn't it.

Shown below is the oil rig loaded into EnSight. I didn't color it very nicely yet.

So now you have a whole universe of CAD models you can easily search and use in your EnSight animations. Gracias Google.

EnSight Helps Simulate Fish Passage through Hydroturbines

2009-08-26T10:11:00.000-04:00

With the support of Voith Hydro, I am currently developing a program to simulate fish moving downstream through hydropower plants. The main purpose of this simulation is to aid in the development of more “fish-friendly” turbines. EnSight not only helps post-process the results, but also provides data necessary for pre-processing the CFD calculations. The image shows the pressure field on a fish that is subjected to a water jet as it leaves a fish-introduction tube. The water jet simulation represents live-fish experiments carried out by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (http://www.pnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_reports/PNNL-14173.pdf). The PNNL flume CFD calculation was generously provided by Voith Hydro.

Stereo Projection Options

2009-08-25T11:02:00.000-04:00

We were recently asked about hardware options for showing off EnSight's 3D stereo capabilities. This has been a common question over the years and the answer is made more difficult by a constantly changing market of options, new products coming in and other products becoming obsolete. But as of now, here's a few possibilities.

For Projection:

There are two classes of solutions for stereo projection:

1) Passive stereo (2 projectors per screen). These are basically two standard projectors with polarized lenses, which requires a screen that preserves polarization. For one example see the VisDuo solution from VisBox (http://www.visbox.com/). Take care when choosing a graphics card for this solution. It will be much easier to configure if you can drive both projectors from a single graphics card.

2) Active stereo (1 projector per screen). Today this generally means DLP projection. There are lower-cost, lower-resolution solutions like DepthQ (http://www.depthq.com/) and higher-end solutions like Christie Digital (http://www.christiedigital.com/AMEN/Markets/AdvancedVisualization/).

For non-Projection Stereo (in a display)

Another option, for those who are looking to dip their toe into stereo is the Nvidia Vision system. One of our developers bought one of these in June of 2009 for video gaming and he loves it. He brought it into the office to demo it with EnSight. It worked. There were a few issues with EnSight but it was functional. Now the EnSight development team is buying a system ($500 or so) so that those issues can be addressed over time. This solution is not stereo projection, but just stereo in a display. But its bright and flicker free, suitable for a table-top demonstration.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/3D_Vision_Main.html

Our distributors in Japan have also been resellers for 3D stereo displays for several years now. We'll try to dig up that information if anyone is interested, comment to the blog.

EnSight plans for 2009 SuperComputing

2009-08-15T17:49:00.000-04:00

We are currently working on two different events surrounding SuperComputing 2009, SC09.

1) Birds of a Feather.
2) Customer dinner

We'll be previewing EnSight 9.1 features in particular Volume Rendering. You won't want to miss this!

1) EnSight Birds of a Feather (BOF) QUICK FACTS:
Who: CEI EnSight users and prospective users
What: Birds of a feather, agenda pending, technical demonstrations of EnSight 9.1
When: November 17 Tuesday
Where: Room E147-148
Time: 5:30pm-7pm
Cost: $0
If you'd like CEI to address a question, or you'd like to speak, or present, email: kevin@ensight.com

2) Customer dinner QUICK FACTS:
Who: CEI EnSight customers, by invitation
What: Dinner meeting
When: November 18, Wednesday
Time: 5pm-10pm
Cost: $0
To request an invitation,

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=ckhZbm9UTFA0eWlsSUR6RDJSel9CN2c6MA..

Where: Red Lion Restaurant, walking distance from the Convention Center

If you want receive these notifications of events, software releases, sign up for our newsletter (in case someone sent this to you).

EnSight helps save lives with coronary artery stent design.

2009-07-21T09:10:00.000-04:00

Learn how EnSight helped engineers at VMI save lives by improving coronary artery stent design.

TeraGrid 09 award

2009-07-15T10:50:00.000-04:00

Samuel Kenny, an EnSight expert from NCSU, recently competed and won the ‘Peoples Choice Award’ at the Visualization Showcase held at the TeraGrid ’09 Conference in Washington, DC.

$99 Academic Version of EnSight CFD

2009-07-07T08:24:00.000-04:00

We are offering a $99 version of our newest product, EnSight CFD, for qualified academic universities, only for a limited time.

ANSYS Airpak Test Models Needed

2009-06-24T17:09:00.001-04:00

Good news! We've got the Fluent Reader now reading Airpak models from ANSYS Airpak. At least the two test models that we already have on hand.

If you have an Airpak model that we can test, please send it to support@ensight.com. Let us know the ftp address where we can access the file. Or ftp it to ftp.ensight.com/pub/incoming and send an email to support@ensight.com with the name of the file once uploading has completed.

If you have Icepak models, send them too!

EnSight CFD vs EnSight Classic

2009-06-24T17:04:00.001-04:00

EnSight CFD is this great new post-processing application from CEI that focuses on the needs of CFD users. It is built on top of EnSight and therefore needs EnSight to be installed in order to run. EnSight CFD runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Its GUI is more polished and focused. And because its newer, it looks more modern.

I think its time to introduce a new term here, we need a way to refer to the GUI which 99.9% of EnSight customers are still using. In a nod to sugar-flavored drink industry I propose EnSight Classic. What do you think? Got another name for the family?

EnSight "Classic" is what I call the core products of CEI that do not yet employ the new GUI.

So EnSight Classic includes:
EnSight Lite
EnSight Standard
EnSight Gold
EnSight DR

And that GUI looks like this.

Thousands of people already have learned how to use and benefit from this GUI. So using a different GUI for them would be some lost productivity and training. So we are working to maintain and improve both EnSight CFD’s new GUI and the Classic GUI. The Classic GUI is getting additional tools and features but not radically changing or impacting the current user workflow.

EnSight CFD has fewer users and a more focused user base, so its GUI is taking more risks and doing things differently in some cases than the Classic GUI.

You can easily switch between them if you have licensed EnSight Lite, EnSight Standard, EnSight Gold, or EnSight DR. However if you’ve only licensed EnSight CFD then that’s the only one you can use.

Classic or CFD, or both, the choice is yours.

EnSight CFD How To

2009-05-19T15:09:00.000-04:00

We have a great new tutorial about how to navigate EnSight CFD, covering some of the basics, including windows and panels, right click menus and click-n-go features.

View tutorial

EnSight for CFD users...

2009-04-28T11:41:00.000-04:00

Our development team has been tirelessly working the past several months to create a product specifically for CFD users. The look and feel of this new product is based on customer requests for a prettier GUI and an easier to use interface. Plus we have new features just for CFD users, like directly importing your FLUENT and CFX data and a new 'simple' calculator to quickly calculate functions you use frequently.

We hope we hit the mark. Check it out today by downloading EnSight CFD. And here is a link to the feature page.

Let us know what you think: comments, concerns, is it easier to use? Do you love it, hate it, or somewhere in between?

CEI visits wiiBounce to celebrate EnSight CFD release

2009-04-27T10:09:00.000-04:00

We visited wiiBounce last week to celebrate the release of EnSight CFD. There were wii competitions, slides, bouncing basketball and lots of fun. Check out the pictures:

Connect with EnSight users on Facebook and LinkedIn

2009-04-13T14:41:00.000-04:00

We have recently created an EnSight page on Facebook and would like to invite you to join. If you type EnSight in the search box our page should come up as the second item in the search. If you don't find it there, click on the Pages tab and it should be the only item in that search. Please sign up to 'Become a Fan'. We will be posting information on new things we are doing with the products here, or you can post your images and make comments, it will be a great way to share information.

Also, we have created an EnSight User Group on LinkedIn that you should join. Type EnSight in the search area, be sure and choose to Search Groups, and voila, there we are. We plan to post news to the EnSight User Group, which already has a a small following right now. Help us grow this group!

Come join us on these popular social networking sites, we can't wait to meet you!

Scientists Aim to Save Lives where Animations Play a Key Role

2009-03-30T14:28:00.000-04:00

Researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) are using EnSight visualizations to investigate a medical condition known as abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), or “triple A” for short. To appreciate the importance of this research, one must consider the number of lives it could potentially save. It is estimated that that about 15,000 people in the U.S. die each year from ruptured AAAs, which is roughly equivalent to the number of murder victims in the U.S. annually.

These researchers are working to help medical professionals predict the likelihood of AAA rupture and make the most effective use of new or improved stent-graft designs developed in virtual reality.

Read More >>

CEI announces more powerful version of EnSight Lite

2009-03-09T14:08:00.001-04:00

APEX, N.C., March 10, 2009 – CEI announced today the latest release of its visualization product, EnSight Lite, version 9.0. This version is more affordable and easier to use. EnSight Lite is aimed at small- and medium-sized companies, and large companies looking to maximize their post-processing investment across the enterprise.

New improvements to EnSight Lite include: easier to use interface, cutting user time to reach common features; the use of keyframe animations, a method to control a virtual camera for movie sequences; and the ability to work with both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

2009 Calendar Contest Winners

2009-02-23T10:02:00.000-05:00

2009 Calendar Contest Winners

Thank you to everyone who submitted an image for the 2009 calendar. And the winners are...

LSU Mathematician Uses EnSight to Predict Structural Failure

2009-02-10T10:47:00.000-05:00

LSU Mathematician Uses EnSight to Predict Structural Failure

When the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis collapsed during the evening rush hour on August 1, 2007 killing 13 people, millions were stunned by the tragic scene. Images of cars, semi-trucks, and even a school bus, teetering some 115 feet over the mighty Mississippi River left many wondering, “Could that happen here, where I live?” In the days that followed, motorists around the country gave more careful consideration to the bridges and overpasses that they travel every day, which before had never garnered a second thought. While the specific cause of the collapse remains undetermined, most experts agree that some mechanical failure is to blame.

Skyboxes

2009-01-29T13:36:00.000-05:00

One of the new QuickTools in EnSight 9.0 allows the user to generate "Skyboxes".

What is a skybox? The idea behind a skybox is that a carefully constructed texture, if mapped onto a cube appears like the sky and horizon from inside of the cube. A picture is the best way to explain. In the animation, you can see the skybox from both outside of the textured cube and from inside of the cube. When you place geometry inside of the cube, it appears to be...

Read more, http://www.ensight.com/skyboxes-5.html