User Defined Interface
EnSight 8.2 can be easily customized to better fit the specific visualization needs of each user.  It is possible to add your own user interface to EnSight in order to enhance the current GUI or you can replace the entire GUI with your own. Button text, tool tips, icon image, and script files are all easily managed via EnSight's integrated, hierarchal python editor as well as the native command language scripts. Several examples of this can be found in the 8.2 installation.  This user defined interface is now turned on by default, see image below.

Self-extracting .els and .csf files from within EnSight
CEI has supported to ability to generate "embedded" executables that combine the viewing program and the data file(s) into one, self-extracting executable for some time. This system allows users to share complex, interactive visualizations with colleagues without requiring the recipients to install any additional software on their systems.  This capability has been available in the Reveal tool for some time and in the EnLiten tool on the Windows platform.  With the latest release of EnSight, support in the EnLiten tool has been extended to additional platforms. Moreover, the ability to generate these files has been integrated directly into EnSight, making it possible to generate these files in fewer steps than before.  It also allows the files to be generated directly from the EnSight command language, making it possible to script the entire post-processing operation in batch mode.  With these new capabilities, it is possible for a user to produce portable (install-less) interactive 3D datasets as part of standardized, automated processing data.

 

New Calculator Functions in EnSight 

With the 8.2.6h release, a number of new calculator functions have been added to EnSight. These include basic statistics, multivariate regression, common statistical distributions and signed distance field functionality. The articles in this series will cover these new functions and give simple examples of their use.

 

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EnSight Plotting Samples	Quick Tutorial
	Using Interactive Query and the Plotter Right click to download movie

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"Test:" commands are a form of shortcut in EnSight that allow sophisticated visualizations or data processing with little user input. A complete listing of the "test:" commands may be obtained by issuing the command "test: list" in the Command Entry box in the Command dialog of EnSight (Edit -> Command).

Warning: "Test:" commands are not supported and are experimental, allowing CEI and customers to try out new features and make unique tweaks without extensive modifications to the EnSight user interface. Use these commands with caution.

Two very useful commands are the "test: special xyz clip," used to create a midplane clip, and "test: special 2d plot," used to create a plot of values computed at a number of incremental positions of a line or plane clip.

The procedures to use these two "test:" commands are described below.

 

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EnSight Isosurface Sample	Quick Tutorial
	Using EnSight for CFD - Part 2 Right click to download movie

 

EnSight Streamline Samples	Quick Tutorial
	Using EnSight for CFD - Part 2 Right click to download movie

 

 

EnSight Transient Particle Trace/Pathline Samples	Quick Tutorial
	Creating Transient Flow Field Pathlines Right click to download movie

 

EnSight Vortex Core Samples	Quick Tutorial
	Extracting Flow Features Right click to download movie
	Article
	Getting the Most Out of EnSight's Improved Flow-Feature Extraction Right click to download article

 

 

EnSight Boundary Layer Samples	Quick Tutorial
	Extracting Flow Features Right click to download movie
	Article
	Extraction of Boundary Layer Characteristics from Fluent Results Right click to download article

 

EnSight Surface Restricted Traces Samples	Quick Tutorial
	Extracting Flow Features Right click to download movie
	Article
	Getting the Most Out of EnSight's Improved Flow-Feature Extraction Right click to download article

With EnSight 8.2.6(c), CEI has expanded the supplied collection of user defined tools to include “QuickTools”. QuickTools are a set of simple Python based user defined EnSight extensions that simplify common operations that might otherwise be complex or impossible to do easily in EnSight. QuickTools are provided with complete source code and users are encouraged to inspect and modify them to meet their own needs.

Accessing QuickTools

The QuickTools are accessed through the user defined tools icon from the icon strip located below the main EnSight menu bar. If this icon is not available in your icon set, you can enable it using the “Modify and save icon layout…” button in the “General User Interface” preferences panel. When the icon is selected, the user defined tools panel is displayed.  The panel is a collection of horizontal tabs and looks like this:  

To access the QuickTools, click on the “EnSight Quick Tools” tab and you will see the QuickTools.

Import a query from a CSV (Comma Separated Value) formatted text file

EnSight has the ability to read queries from external ASCII text files, but the format of these files are specific to EnSight (see the User Manual, chapter 11.10). Many users have data in standard tabular formatted text files (e.g. CSV files from Excel) and may not be in a position to easily reformat this type of data. This QuickTool is designed to help, it can import data directly from CSV and similarly formatted ASCII files as EnSight queries. When the QuickTools button is clicked, the user is first prompted to select the file to open.  Once a file is selected, a dialog is opened to select importing options:

 

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Import a movie or image as a textured annotation

A common request at CEI is the desire to include actual video footage of an experiment synchronized with the simulated model. In EnSight, this involves creating a 2D rectangle annotation and texturing it by a video clip. EnSight has had the ability to apply a texture to 2D shape annotations since early in the 8.2 release cycle and the ability to use movie files as textures in more recent releases. The operation is normally performed through the 2D shapes and texture map editors in EnSight. However, there are a relatively large number of options and settings for these operations and while they describe what operations they perform, it is not always obvious that these features might be used to create an animated annotation. This QuickTool simplifies the process, reducing it to a single step and setting all of the various options you need. When the QuickTool button is clicked, EnSight will prompt you for an image/movie file. Once the selected imagery is loaded into memory, the tool creates a new rectangle annotation and sets up the texture mapping.  An example image of the result:

Note that if an animation is loaded as an annotation, it is linked to the solution times of the loaded dataset. To cause the animation to play back, you need only play the solution time. One thing to be cautious of, EnSight does load the entire video clip into memory and stores it in a lossless fashion internally. Larger clips, especially with large numbers of frames can use up a great deal of memory. The resulting animated clip and geometry can of course be exported to an EnLiten file as well, including the integrated playback.

The EnSight graphics performance tests

 

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With EnSight 8.2.6(e), CEI introduced a new, native Python API. This API builds on and largely supersedes the 'ensight.sendmesg()' API provided in previous versions of EnSight. The 'sendmesg()' API is still present in EnSight, but Python developers may find this new API much simpler to work with. Tools are also provided to automate the conversion of EnSight command language into this new API. These functions are fully documented in section 6 of the EnSight 'Interface' manual.

Accessing the Python interpreter

The Python interpreter in EnSight can be directly accessed through the File->Command... menu option and then selecting the "Python" tab of the Command Dialog. The dialog looks like this:

 

  

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

Skyboxes 101

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 inside of an environment.