The latest version of EnSight is now available, EnSight 2008 Winter Release. This release includes several new additions to the powerful visualization product; highlights include an option to add CAD file importers to access native CAD files without the use of the original CAD system, a new FLUENT direct interface beta reader, and the introduction of Chameleon Mode, a technique to modify your graphical user interface (GUI) to suit your specific needs.
EnSight’s new CAD reader allows you to access native CAD files, and directly read them into EnSight. The CAD import feature in EnSight opens and reads file formats from the major CAD systems, allowing you to display the CAD model, and export these CAD entities into EnSight's EnLiten .els and Reveal .csf file formats. Click here to view a tutorial on the CAD import functionality.
The new FLUENT direct data reader improves the speed, robustness, and capability of the your experience. With the new FLUENT beta reader you will have faster data loading; SOS support for large models and distributed computations; and convenience specifically related to quickly uncompressing zipped files, availability of a list of variables for parts, and the ability to load a single part. Click here for the FLUENT beta reader overview.
Chameleon Mode allows you to switch from the standard EnSight GUI to your own custom GUI directly within EnSight. You can use a simplified GUI for everyday work and then switch to EnSight's standard GUI for advanced features. Click on the thumbnail image to the left for an example of an alternative GUI written using Chameleon Mode. CEI has developed several applications based on Chameleon Mode allowing you to enable custom applications, clone existing applications, and simplify routine operations for a shorter learning curve. With Chameleon Mode it's your imagination that decides how the application looks and feels.
Adobe Acrobat 3D and EnSight
Adobe Acrobat 3D 8.0 has integrated 3D support with import options from a number of standard file formats. EnSight users can output static geometry data in VRML format and read the results directly into Acrobat 3D for embedding in documents. When viewed with the freely available Acrobat Reader 8.0 viewer, the user can click on the model in this PDF file and interact with the 3D model.
Expanded Cluster Support
You will find numerous improvements to the robustness, features, performance and flexibility of cluster support in EnSight Gold running SOS and EnSight DR. See the details page for more information about specific minor changes made in this release. One frequent request you made was the ability to compute the maximum, minimum, sum, or average of values across all nodes of the cluster. All computed constants now automatically result in a global result, eliminating extra steps when using the variable calculator. See the User Manual, Chapter 4.3, for more details.
Leopard Support
If you use Apple's Leopard (10.5) Mac OS X operating system you are now supported on EnSight. The current EnSight client for Leopard remains a 32-bit application. The EnSight server is a 64-bit application, but CEI expects a 64-bit version of the EnSight client to be available to you as an update within the next 4 weeks. Contact your CEI representative if you would like to be informed about that update, or sign up here for the CEI Announce mailing list and receive software updates as they happen.
Many of you have data in standard tabular formatted text files (for exampls, .csv files from Excel) and may not be in a position to easily reformat this type of data. This new QuickTool is designed to help you import data directly from .csv and similarly formatted ASCII files as EnSight queries. The spreadsheet has no real spreadsheet functionality at the current time; it only provides a preview for importing a query into EnSight. The spreadsheet tool can preview your data using Matplotlib and send it to EnSight's query/plot feature for plotting. Check out this new step-by-step tutorial.
We are pleased to be offering you more plotting options with this release.CEI continues to leverage the huge tool set provided by the Python community. Part of that set of tools is the Matplotlib plotting library. To see what Matplotlib is capable of doing, see its home page screenshot samples. Check out this new step-by-step tutorial.
The top and middle images were made within EnSight using the included Matplotlib open source library to show data from the new EnSight Performance Tests. Tell us what you would like to see supported between EnSight andMatplotlib in the future. See these tutorials, QuickTools and QuickTools Part II, to get started.
EnSight's previous plotting capability is available to you as before using the Query/Plot Tool as shown in the image to the left.
With an earlier release of EnSight, 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. You can convert a .enc file by loading the file into the script editor window, selecting all of the text, and converting the file to native Python. The result can be saved as a ‘.py’ file. See this tutorial to get started, or visit Section 6 of the EnSight 'Interface' manual for more details.
New functions in this release of EnSight include computing a constant with statistics moments by applying a selected statistical function over all of the nodes or elements of the selected parts. The five functions provided are: sum, mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis. See the EnSight User Manual section 4.3 on Variable Creation for more details.
Other new functions in this release include common probability and cumulative probability distribution functions like Normal, Student's T, F and Chi-squared; and Multivariate linear regression over nodal and element scalar fields at single timestep.
Improved Surface Restricted Particle Traces Surface restricted traces are now thread-safe for higher performance on your multi-core machines. The updated tracer also better handles transitions across multiple parts.
2x Compressed EnSight Archives and EnLiten Files EnSight now uses compression to save archives for your session backups and for creating EnLiten files. Typical file compression achieved is 2x smaller. Testing indicates that to restore a compressed archive file the added step of decompression is offset by the shorter time to load the data from disk into memory. In effect your total waiting time is not significantly changed and CPU usage is increased. Your actual experience may vary depending on your network, distance to storage, etc. Compression and decompression of files happens automatically, no changes are required on your part. EnLiten files are now also compressed and should be about 2x smaller.
The new FLUENT direct data reader improves the speed, robustness, and capability of the your experience. With the new FLUENT beta reader you will have faster data loading; SOS support for large models and distributed computations; and convenience specifically related to quickly uncompressing zipped files, availability of a list of variables for parts, and the ability to load a single part. Click here for the 
Chameleon Mode allows you to switch from the standard EnSight GUI to your own custom GUI directly within EnSight. You can use a simplified GUI for everyday work and then switch to EnSight's standard GUI for advanced features. Click on the thumbnail image to the left for an example of an alternative GUI written using Chameleon Mode. CEI has developed several applications based on Chameleon Mode allowing you to enable custom applications, clone existing applications, and simplify routine operations for a shorter learning curve. With Chameleon Mode it's your imagination that decides how the application looks and feels.
You will find numerous improvements to the robustness, features, performance and flexibility of cluster support in EnSight Gold running SOS and EnSight DR. See the details page for more information about specific minor changes made in this release. One frequent request you made was the ability to compute the maximum, minimum, sum, or average of values across all nodes of the cluster. All computed constants now automatically result in a global result, eliminating extra steps when using the variable calculator. See the User Manual, Chapter 4.3, for more details.
If you use Apple's Leopard (10.5) Mac OS X operating system you are now supported on EnSight. The current EnSight client for Leopard remains a 32-bit application. The EnSight server is a 64-bit application, but CEI expects a 64-bit version of the EnSight client to be available to you as an update within the next 4 weeks. Contact your 
Many of you have data in standard tabular formatted text files (for exampls, .csv files from Excel) and may not be in a position to easily reformat this type of data. This new QuickTool is designed to help you import data directly from .csv and similarly formatted ASCII files as EnSight queries. The spreadsheet has no real spreadsheet functionality at the current time; it only provides a preview for importing a query into EnSight. The spreadsheet tool can preview your data using Matplotlib and send it to EnSight's query/plot feature for plotting. Check out this new 
With an earlier release of EnSight, 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. You can convert a .enc file by loading the file into the script editor window, selecting all of the text, and converting the file to native Python. The result can be saved as a ‘.py’ file. See this 
New functions in this release of EnSight include computing a constant with statistics moments by applying a selected statistical function over all of the nodes or elements of the selected parts. The five functions provided are: sum, mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis. See the EnSight User Manual section 4.3 on Variable Creation for more details.
Surface restricted traces are now thread-safe for higher performance on your multi-core machines. The updated tracer also better handles transitions across multiple parts.
EnSight now uses compression to save archives for your session backups and for creating EnLiten files. Typical file compression achieved is 2x smaller. Testing indicates that to restore a compressed archive file the added step of decompression is offset by the shorter time to load the data from disk into memory. In effect your total waiting time is not significantly changed and CPU usage is increased. Your actual experience may vary depending on your network, distance to storage, etc. Compression and decompression of files happens automatically, no changes are required on your part. EnLiten files are now also compressed and should be about 2x smaller.
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