EnSight CFD

EnSight CFD 3.5.1

2011-06-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

Wow, has it been a year since our last post on this blog. Sorry about that. We've been working in other web areas and kind of got slack here on EnSight CFD's blog.

There's a new version of EnSight CFD, version 3.5. The Free version now has all the same CFD readers as the paid version. And now there's an OpenFOAM reader for all to enjoy. The OpenFOAM reader even reads parallel OpenFOAM files without reconstructing them to single files! There's more to 3.5 but that's the highlights. Come check it out at www.ensightcfd.com or www.ceisoftware.com.

Over and out.

P.S. - also stay informed via our Facebook page, www.facebook.com/ceisoftware

EnSight CFD 3.0

2010-07-08T14:05:00.001-07:00

Hey everyone we just released this week EnSight CFD 3.0.

The big news with 3.0 is that we now have a variable calculator. There are some other things like a text editor and support for structured (IJK) models. But the variable calculator is the biggest deal.

There is still both a free and paid versions. Free if your models are under 2 million cells and you don't need phone technical support, a few other minor differences. We are very excited about the rapid adoption of EnSight CFD. Even the free version means that people are giving to us their ideas on how to improve CFD post-processing and visualization.

This is pretty cool because version 1.0 came out in April or May 2009, version 2.0 came out in January 2010, version 2.1 came out with a streamlined GUI in March 2010 and already we are on 3.0 in July.

Please feel free to download the new version and tell us what you like and what you want to see next.

http://www.ensightcfd.com/download/download.html

One caveat: EnSight CFD 3 is no longer part of the EnSight installation. So you need to install it separately. That lets us release it on a more aggressive release schedule and not tie EnSight and EnSight CFD release schedules together.

Voting for the best Ideas comes to EnSight CFD

2010-05-21T14:10:00.001-07:00

Today we added Ideas forum to EnSight CFD support forums.

When you submit an Idea to the forum, other members of the community can vote "Me Too" and acknowledge that your idea is a good one.

To motivate creation of good suggestions for how to improve EnSight CFD we are giving out highly desired and exclusive EnSight CFD coffee mugs to the suggestions which garner 3 votes by July 4, 2010.

Winner of Apple iPad from CEI announced

2010-04-08T10:15:00.001-07:00

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.

Feature Request for EnSight CFD - Field Calculator

2010-04-02T06:27:00.000-07:00

As people try out EnSight CFD they are noticing that it lacks the powerful variable calculator of EnSight.

EnSight CFD does have a calculator, we sometimes call it the "simple calculator", which is great for calculating a single value like the flow rate through a part. But the simple calculator can't compute a new variable field for you, something EnSight can do.

But never fear, EnSight CFD is getting this capability this summer in version 3.0. Its already in the works.

Want to win an iPad?

2010-03-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

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 CFD Academic Price Increase

2010-03-19T10:45:00.000-07:00

All good things come to an end. As previously advertised, we plan to
discontinue $99 EnSight CFD at the end of this month, raising our price
for academic, nodelocked, leases from $99 to $199 for the foreseeable future (deadline
TBD).

Why are we doing a price increase? There's really a lot of good reasons....

EnSight CFD 2.1 will continue EnSight CFD's continuous improvements in polish to the look and feel,
more native to Windows and Apple platforms, making it very popular with
customers.

We never intended $99 to last forever, we believed that it was a good way
to start getting the word out a year ago when v1.0 was first released.
Since that time we've had many new customers adopt EnSight CFD,
some who have never before used EnSight but were long time
users of something else.

And at that time of first releasing v1.0 we
did not have a Free version available.

Finally since then we have
released four more versions: 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, and now 2.1. In that time, a
lot of improvement has gone in, including simple calculator, volume
rendering, session files, and native interfaces.

EnSight CFD will continue to be primarily a tool for the low end of the
market, it it not the goal to make it a competitor to EnSight Standard,
Gold, etc. by matching feature for feature. But rather to make it
attractive to the customer who never before considered CEI's software
products or thought they were only for the HPC user.

We are trying to tell all of our prospects for $99 version to buy before
the end of March in order to avoid the increased price. However we don't
believe that $100 more after April 1 is going to break anyone's bank
accounts.

If you haven't tried the software, now that EnSight CFD 2.1 is released, and before the price increase, there's never been a better time to try it.

EnSight CFD turns 2.1

2010-03-18T10:38:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce the release of EnSight CFD v2.1.

This version has the following improvements in the GUI.

1) New, Cleaner, Unified Toolbar
2) Native File > Open Dialogs (Mac users and Windows users will especially notice)
3) Improved GUI panels locking, tabbing, etc.
4) Unified several File Dialogs

1) The New Toolbar is improved in these ways
- It has fewer options and only the important ones are shown, making it easier to learn
- The view icons, which were frequently used were brought to the top, making them easier to find
- Unifying the icons on the toolbar for a better appearance
- Assumes that parts and variables panels will be used
- Consolidates several buttons under the Views menu
- Puts detailed panels such as Properties, Annotations, and Calculator on the right side

2) The Native Dialogs is improved in these ways
- File > Open now uses the Windows and Mac file navigation dialog making the search for your dataset much easier and more natural
- Printing, Colors, and other native dialogs used
- First you select the dataset to be opened. Then a separate dialog asks for details like the timestep, transient information, and other options.

3) The GUI panels are improved in these ways
- Less prone to move by accident
- Locking available and on by default to prevent them from moving
- Tabbing if you like to tab your panels
- These controls hidden by default, but easily accessed with a right-click

4) File > Open unifies several previous menus
File > Restore Session, File > Open handles sessions
File > Open can accept sessions, datasets, and images

Capabilities are pretty much the same as version 2.0.

So EnSight 2.1 does not introduce new capabilities. Its target was to make the current capabilities easier, more natural, and more pleasant to look at. Let us know if you like it.

There is still the free and paid versions of EnSight CFD.

Desktop Engineering watching the Mac

2010-03-16T14:32:00.001-07:00

Kenneth Wong from Desktop Engineering brings an update on some of the CAE and CAD applications that are supporting the Mac platform.

EnSight CFD 2.0 has been released

2010-02-25T05:20:00.001-08:00

CEI is announcing the release of EnSight CFD 2.0. It features volume rendering and session files and a Cocoa Mac version. CEI has also created a new website for EnSight CFD, www.ensightcfd.com.

But perhaps the most interesting addition to EnSight CFD 2.0 is a free version. The free version has some limits in file size (number of elements), doesn't read all the same data formats, and has a small watermark on the screen. But other than that, and lack of access to personal support, seems to be comparable to the paid version. See this comparison chart between EnSight CFD's free and paid versions.

CEI didn't have to make a free version to appeal to their current EnSight customer base since its possible to run EnSight CFD using a current installation and license of EnSight, for no additional cost. Its just a Window > Interfaces > EnSight CFD menu pick. EnSight CFD is not targeted to the current EnSight customers.

How does EnSight CFD compare to EnSight Lite or Standard or Gold?

EnSight CFD lags behind classic EnSight versions such as Lite, Standard, Gold, and DR in terms of high end features like batch mode, client-server, python scripting, command window, variable field calculator, keyframe animation and more. See this feature list. But according to the marketplace EnSight CFD is pretty comparable or beyond to other applications which have been at the lower level of capability to classic EnSight. And for the price of free it seems worth looking into.

It's clear that CEI is pursuing a strategy of serving the whole range of the CFD post-processing market from students and newbies to CFD with EnSight CFD priced at free to the high end with EnSight Gold and EnSight DR serving the supercomputing community at $10,000/year. And it seems that CEI has decided to make its free version of EnSight CFD as its lead marketing pitch. Maybe TV ads are not as cheap as has been reported in the news.

MacWorld Response is Excellent

2010-02-13T16:50:00.000-08:00

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 OpenFOAM CFD solution

2010-02-10T10:55:00.001-08:00

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

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.

This would go along great with a free Mac CFD post-processor, EnSight CFD Free edition.

EnSight CFD Free includes Volume Rendering

2010-01-29T00:09:00.000-08:00

Maybe in all the confusion of EnSight CFD 2.0, EnSight 9.1, Volume Rendering feature, and the Cocoa Mac version of EnSight CFD, and EnSight CFD Free we somehow left people with the impression that you had to buy EnSight CFD to get Volume Rendering. Not so. Even the Free version has this capability. Doesn't that just rock? Volume Rendering for free.

So can you make cool images with that? Check it out for yourself. Aric Meyer of our Shanghai office made these images with it today.

Watch this blog for an upcoming announcement about an image/animation contest regarding EnSight CFD.

Free version of EnSight CFD 2.0

2010-01-28T10:09:00.000-08:00

CEI is announcing the release of EnSight 9.1 and EnSight CFD 2.0. EnSight 9.1 features volume rendering and session files. EnSight CFD is also featuring volume rendering and session files, while adding a Cocoa Mac version. CEI has also created a new website for EnSight CFD, www.ensightcfd.com.

The free version seems designed for a couple of target audiences:
- People using other post-processors
- People who want to try out EnSight CFD without first contacting CEI's sales people
- CFD solver software developers, promoting the open EnSight Case file format
- University students and others who are starting to learn CFD

CEI didn't have to make a free version to appeal to their current EnSight customer base since its possible to run EnSight CFD using a current installation and license of EnSight, for no additional cost. Its just a Window > Interfaces > EnSight CFD menu pick. So apparently the free EnSight CFD is not targeted to the current EnSight customers.

How does EnSight CFD compare to EnSight Lite or Standard or Gold?

EnSight CFD still lags behind classic EnSight versions such as Lite, Standard, Gold, and DR in terms of high end features like batch mode, client-server, python scripting, command window, variable field calculator, keyframe animation and such. See this feature list. But according to the marketplace EnSight CFD is pretty comparable or beyond to Fieldview, Tecplot, CFD-Post, Paraview and other applications which have been at the lower level of capability to classic EnSight. And for the price of free it seems worth looking into. If the limits of data readers file formats (EnSight, Tecplot, and Fluent formats) or the 2 million element model size are not a problem for you then you get the best of all worlds, free price and modern, interactive, easy to use tool. If the limits do bother you, then for academic customers the price to remove them is only $400 (which CEI has reduced for the introductory period to only $99). CEI also has special pricing for class and campus licenses. And for commercial and government customers the price is the same as EnSight Lite, which is only $1,600. CEI is taking a page from Apple's $.99 songs on iTunes or $.99 Apps for iPhones believing that when you have something attractive you should also price it well and grab a huge following.

CEI will continue to develop EnSight CFD so that it has some of the features lacking vs classic EnSight over time, and surely will be careful which features are free and which cost money. Obviously they have to make money to stay in business. So expect that the Free and Paid versions get more distinct over time.

It's clear that CEI is pursuing a strategy of serving the whole range of the CFD post-processing market from low end with EnSight CFD priced at free to the high end with EnSight Gold and EnSight DR serving the supercomputing community at $10,000/year. And it seems that CEI has decided to make its free version of EnSight CFD as its lead marketing pitch, maybe TV ads are not as cheap as has been reported in the news.

What do you think? We'd like to hear from you on whether this might cause you to look at the various versions of EnSight.

A native cocoa Mac GUI? Really?

2009-12-04T10:51:00.000-08:00

Yes, its true. EnSight CFD 2.0 and beyond will have a native Mac GUI. No more X11, a smoother, faster, more natural feeling.

There is actually two kinds of EnSight CFD 2.0 for the Mac.

Type 1: X11. If you are starting in EnSight's Classic GUI (which includes Lite, Standard, Gold, DR) and you switch to the EnSight CFD GUI you are still going to be in X11 and all that that entails. This version is good for those who want to be able to switch back and forth from EnSight CFD to Classic EnSight. Good for people who have been using Classic EnSight for awhile, maybe have created custom python tools they want to retain access to.

Type 2: Cocoa. If you start EnSight CFD on the Mac directly (not from within EnSight Classic) then you are going to get all the native Cocoa Mac goodness.

If we didn't do it this way, Mac users of Classic wouldn't be able to switch from Classic to CFD and back again. Or we wouldn't have a Mac native cocoa application.

So, start from the dock or Launchpad or whatever directly to EnSight CFD if you want to go native and feel more natural. If you like things rough and X11-ish, start from Classic.

EnSight CFD 2.0 countdown!

2009-12-04T07:48:00.000-08:00

EnSight CFD 2.0 is right around the corner. Expect something January 25, 2010.

Some highlights:

- free version for small models!

- native cocoa Mac gui

- more features

We'll be posting about all of these in future posts.