Abaqus S12

[Brittany Bhadd]

Thiswas originally posted by Dan Milligan, but I wanted to take the opportunity to recreate this post so we can expand on some of the functionality for some of our Autodesk Simulation Composite Analysis users.

This week I will take a short break from the composites related content I have been writing about over the past few weeks to address an issue that has become slightly annoying with the latest releases of Abaqus/Viewer. In the most recent versions of Abaqus/Viewer (6.10-x and up I believe) the default font size for the legend and the title/state blocks is so small that it is almost unreadable (even for my relatively young eyes...). Inside of Abaqus/Viewer, adjusting the font size is very simple:

However, doing this process each time you open Viewer is rather annoying. To automatically set the font size to a larger size each time view opens, you can modify the Abaqus environment file. For those that do not know what this is, it is a text file called "abaqus_v6.env" that is located in the Site folder of the Abaqus install directory (typically C:\SIMULIA\Abaqus\6.11-1\site or something similar). The following 5 lines can be added to the bottom of the environment file so that the font size is larger by default. I have found size 12 to be adequate and the following lines reflect that (however a larger number can be entered):

Try to copy and paste the lines exactly like they are shown above, but if it is not possible, make sure the spacing (especially the indentation) and content is correct. If these lines are entered incorrectly, Abaqus/Viewer may not start up correctly. Don't worry though, you can't screw anything up. If you are having problems and just can figure out what is being input incorrectly, you can simply delete the above lines and everything will be fine. For the super paranoid, simply make a backup copy of your environment file before trying this...

With the def onCaeStarup(): line, many other default settings can be adjusted so that your Abaqus 'environment' is set up just the way you like. Section 17.19 in the Abaqus Scripting Reference Manual provides many other Viewport Annotation Options commands and by opening your Abaqus replay (.rpy) file after you perform a series of adjustments in Viewer, you can view additional commands that set up your Viewer experience.

AFAIK Abaqus ODB is not an open format. Reading such files implies to have an Abaqus license and to use the Abaqus API to read and parse the files, so this is not something that we could distribute as a opensource plugin. Some ParaView users have developed (and we also did it for them) such readers.

IMHO it would be possible to develop a reader plugin for abaqus, it would just not be distributed in the release, would require the user to build ParaView or ParaView-Superbuild. It will require a licensed installation of libabaqus on the user system.

This is a proprietary format that requires a commercial licence to be read.

en.wikipedia.org AbaqusAbaqus FEA (formerly ABAQUS) is a software suite for finite element analysis and computer-aided engineering, originally released in 1978. The name and logo of this software are based on the abacus calculation tool.The Abaqus product suite consists of five core software products: The Abaqus products use the open-source scripting language Python for scripting and customization. Abaqus/CAE uses the fox-toolkit for GUI development. Abaqus company was founded in 1978 by Dr. David Hibbitt, Dr. Bengt...

A license would not be required if someone was to reverse engineer the file format. However, in order to do the reverse engineering one would need sample odb files. It is possible the Abaqus license prohibits sharing odb files with non-license-holders in an attempt to prohibit reverse engineering. I would be surprised if this were the case (it might not even be legal to enforce this license everywhere), but it is important not to induce people to violate agreements they have made.

For reference:

stackoverflow.com Is it legal to reverse engineer binary file formats reverse-engineering, file-format asked by Einar on 02:08PM - 23 Sep 08 UTC

stackoverflow.com How to reverse engineer binary file formats for compatibility purposes reverse-engineering, binaryfiles asked by Sylverdrag on 01:41PM - 03 Feb 09 UTC

3a8082e126