Export Mesh and Its Geometry Association

Coreform Cubit offers the option to export a complete finite element mesh, along with its association to an ACIS geometry model. This is useful if a 3rd party application is going to be used to modify the mesh after exporting from Coreform Cubit, and you want the geometry available to project to during the modification operations. The command is:

Export m2g '<fileroot>' [{opennurbs|ACIS}] [overwrite]

The fileroot argument to this command is not a complete filename, rather, it is a full path and filename without the file extension. The export m2g command will write out:

• fileroot.XYZ: A geometry file containing the geometric model, where XYZ is the 3 letter file extension of the requested geometry output.
• fileroot.exo: The full mesh in the exodus format.
• fileroot.m2g: An ascii file defining how the mesh in fileroot.exo is associated to fileroot.sat.

The export m2g command can export either an ACIS (*.sat) file or an OpenNurbs (*.3dm) file depending on the supported geometry types of the downstream 3rd party application in use. The default is to export an ACIS file.

An example usage of the export m2g command is the Sierra mesh_scale command. Sierra mesh_scale is a batch program which performs the same mesh scaling as can be performed in Coreform Cubit with the scale mesh command. When generating new nodes on the boundary of the mesh, Sierra mesh_scale projects the locations of the new nodes to the ACIS geometry model by leveraging the information exported by the export m2g command.