DEFENSE

CEI today announced EnSight Lite, new software that delivers essential features of the company's EnSight extreme visualization software at half the price. EnSight Lite is aimed at small- and medium-sized companies, large companies looking to maximize their visualization investment across the enterprise, and academic institutions. "EnSight Lite represents the most advanced visualization functionality ever offered at this price point," says Darin McKinnis, CEI's vice president of marketing and sales. "It offers the powerful core visualization features used by the world's leading engineering and scientific organizations, and provides an easy migration path to other products in the EnSight family." EnSight Lite supports every major CAE solver, with more than 60 interfaces for finite element, CFD, structural, crash, dynamics and hydrocode analysis. It runs on 32-bit platforms, including Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. EnSight, EnSight Gold and EnSight DR support 64-bit platforms. A complete visualization environment EnSight Lite uses the same icon-based interface as EnSight, enabling users to learn the program quickly and move easily into higher levels of functionality. It provides a complete visualization environment, including advanced features for global and part attributes, query, plotting, page layouts and reports, and high-quality animation. EnSight Lite users will have free access to EnLiten and EnVideo, easy-to-use packages that enable geometry, animation and images from the EnSight family of products to be shared with peers, customers and suppliers. A wide range of data types are handled by EnSight Lite, including: - structured, unstructured and mixed; - 1D, 2D and 3D linear and quadratic elements, and n-sided 2D and n-faced 3D; - constants, scalars, vectors, tensors, complex scalars, and complex vectors; - vertex- and element-based variables; - steady state and transient with full connectivity changes such as failed elements or adaptive meshing; rigid body transforms; - experimental data. In addition to standard post-processing capabilities such as clip planes, isosurfaces and vector plots, EnSight Lite includes high-end features such as multiple viewports; the ability to activate parts and variables on an as-needed basis; a command language able to run scripts, macros and batch operations; an interactive variable calculator; and streamtrace animations. "EnSight Lite is a remarkable value for those who need access to a suite containing the most comprehensive range of CFD/FEA visualization tools available," says Paul Gilfrin, account executive for Sharc, the UK's leading provider of pre- and post-processing solutions. "Once professionals gain some experience within the EnSight environment, they shouldn't ever have cause to leave it." Previewing this spring and summer EnSight Lite is scheduled for release this summer and will be priced at $2,500 for a standalone commercial license and $625 for approved academic institutions. It is being shown for the first time today at the ANSYS Conference in Pittsburgh, and will also be demonstrated at user conferences for ABAQUS (May 23-25, Boston), LS-Dyna (June 4-6, Dearborn, Mich.) and MSC.Software Americas (July 17-19, Huntington Beach, Calif.), as well as at the World Congress on Computational Mechanics (July 16-22, Los Angeles).