Release Notes for Coreform Cubit 2021.3

Summary

This release contains several user experience improvements and bug fixes, as well as access to Sculpt meshing functionality. In addition, beginning with this release, the latest version of Coreform Cubit is available on a publicly accessible downloads page—logging into your user account is no longer required for downloading new versions of Coreform Cubit.

Note: You will need to download a new license file, from your user account, for the 2021.3 release due to the completion of our new versioning scheme (see below). This is a one-time occurrence and you will not need to do this again for the remainder of your license term.

Version Numbering

Coreform Cubit now follows a Calendar Versioning scheme of YYYY.MM. This versioning scheme was hinted at in the previous release of Coreform Cubit (2020.2), but now is fully in-place. We intend to release new versions of Coreform Cubit with increasing frequency to provide you with quicker access to the latest bug-fixes and new features. We hope you enjoy the March 2021 release: Coreform Cubit 2021.3!

New Downloads Page

We now provide public downloads of Coreform Cubit. These downloads still require licensing in order to use; however, this will make it easier to get both the latest release and developer builds, and to include Coreform Cubit in your own automated processes.

The Latest Development Builds section of the public downloads page contains regular updates of builds that have passed our automated tests. This can be helpful for you to try fresh builds that may contain a new feature or bug fix of interest to you.

Here’s a link to the public downloads page, or find the link on our banner as shown in the image below

Sculpt is back!

Due to an incompatibility, Sculpt meshing functionality was not included with Coreform Cubit 2020.2. We are now nearing completion of a sustainable, long-term solution to this issue, and in the meantime we’ve implemented a short-term fix that has enabled the packaging of Sculpt with Coreform Cubit 2021.3.

Meshing

hexset Promoted from Developer Command Status

This command was created as part of Jason F. Shepherd’s dissertation, Hexahedral Mesh Generation Constraints. The hexset separate command is designed to create groups containing hexahedral elements based an enclosing set of triangles.

The command is: Hexset Hex <range> Separate Tri <range> [draw]

For example, given a tri-meshed volume as shown below:

We can create a bounding box and mesh it with hexes:

Then, executing the command: hexset hex all separate tri in surf 1 2 results in:

Export Mixed Mesh Blocks to ANSYS CDB

The ANSYS CDB format supports multiple element types to be defined within a single element block. One of our customers found a bug with our CDB exporter in the case pictured below, so we fixed it! Now you can export meshes to ANSYS CDB that are similar to the single-block, mixed hex-pyramid-tet example shown here.

Graphical User Interface

Components renamed to Plugins

We’re doing some exciting work in Coreform Cubit to enable, among other things, isogeometric analysis. We’re layering these capabilities on top of Coreform Cubit, using the Components functionality. As we’ve been working we realized that this was a confusing name for a functionality that everyone else understands to be a plugin. So we’ve gone ahead and renamed this functionality Plugins. This is most clearly seen to the end user through the taskbar:

Added Button to Return Colors to Defaults

We added a button, Reset to Default Colors, to the Global Geometry Colors options panel that allows you to reset the default geometry colors.

Defects Fixed in Coreform Cubit 2021.3

FIXED	Cyrillic and unicode characters in file name paths causes errors
FIXED	At least one command in Cubit isn’t executing “undo group END”
FIXED	empty DLIList: File cannot be saved, critical error
FIXED	Superfluous packages arguing with Linux system libraries
FIXED	Hard crash on boolean unite with groups
FIXED	Cubit not reading & executing .cubit file