Computational Engineering International (CEI) announced recently that its suite of 3D model processing and visualization applications — EnSight, EnSight Gold, EnLiten, and EnVideo — are now available for Mac OS X v10.3 (Panther) on Power Mac G4 and G5 computers. The suite is aimed at the engineering, science, and biomedical industries.
EnSight is CEI’s flagship product. It allows you to visualize a model or design and spot inefficiencies or problems before they occur with the real thing. For example, you can use it to build a 3D car and crash it into a wall to see what will happen. Every aspect of the simulation, from the speed of the car to the materials used to construct the wall, can be controlled.
EnSight Gold moves into the realm of parallel processing, virtual reality, and online collaboration. It can take advantage of clustered computers to provide more horsepower to complex simulations, and you can use it to provide the simulations for walk-through displays. Multiple users can join one EnSight Gold session simultaneously and make changes.
EnLiten is a free 3D viewer that you can use to import EnSight or EnSight Gold simulations and watch them from multiple perspectives. You can add notes to the simulations, output them to most standard formats, including JPEG or MPEG, link them in PowerPoint presentations or to Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator Web pages, and more.
EnVideo is another free viewer that turns simulations into videos viewable on the Internet or an intranet. It uses the evo files created by EnSight, which are approximately the same size as MPEGs. It allows you to loop videos, change their playback speeds, and run them forward or in reverse. It offers 3D stereo, and you can use it to sequence several evo files.
CEI also offers an open source Application Programming Interface (API) that you can use to create evo files in your own software and watch them in EnVideo.
You can download EnLiten and EnVideo from CEI’s Web site, where you can also request trial copies of EnSight and EnSight Gold.
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