Improved Visual Attribute Defaults

We have updated the default visual attributes in EnSight to take advantage of updates to visual representation in the past few years. The new visual defaults have changed for items such as default background color, default ground plane visualization, default legend palette and legend position, default shadowing, default lights, and default materials. These changes are meant to provide easy application of the many enhancements that had been made in EnSight over the past years. Users who do NOT want the new defaults can start EnSight with the command line option "-theme 2024 R2" to force EnSight with the previous default theme. Due to this significant change in visual attributes, 2025 R1 does not automatically copy your preferences from previous version (we leave that up to user to see if they want to pull their preferences on top of the new defaults).

The theme can be specified in the startup stage (instead of using the version's default) using a command line parameter "-theme <themename>" or "-theme <versionnum>".

For more details, see Basic Usage in the Ansys EnSight How-To Manual.

Overlay Hidden Line Improvements

For hidden line rendering, EnSight now has a blending weight associated with the hidden line color. Users can now specify a weight to this grid line, allowing you to model surfaces when zoomed out and prevents the surface from being washed out when elements are densely tessellated. As you zoom closer to the surface, the grid lines will become more visible.

Part List Filter Widget

The Part list now has a filter widget added to the top of the list. This widget can be used to filter the list of parts by name, using a simple filter string which can also include "glob" style wildcard characters.

Change to Timeset Handling

In previous versions of EnSight, the timeset handling for time values in-between explicitly defined timesteps defaulted to "nearest". For changing geometry transient datasets, this could cause robustness failures in EnSight when time step selections from variable and model geometry timesets did not align due to the default nearest time value handling. To improve robustness and remove ambiguity, when presented with datasets that report to contain time varying geometry connectivity, the time value interpolation handling now defaults to "Left of specified time" for both geometry and associated variable timesets.

Omniverse Integration

Integration of EnSight with Omniverse continues to develop. Transient solutions are now available, as well as transfer of flipbook scenes and mesh lines from EnSight to Omniverse. We have also utilized native directory storage location, as well as standards based on USD format (open to more than just Omniverse). A User Defined Tool is now also available in EnSight for this export.

DVS Improvements

We continue development and expansion of the DVS data transfer mechanism. Enhancements in 2025 R1 include performance improvements via Memory Pool implementation, and development towards more flexible caching system.

Qt Library Update

EnSight continues to update both Qt and PyQt Libraries to improve security vulnerabilities and maintain consistency across other Ansys applications.

VTK Library Update

Update to the latest VTK Library to handle newer flavors of the file format.

Rocky Reader Updates

With the first release of the reader in 2024 R2, 2025 R1 continues to expand the reader's capability and scope. Many updates including improvements to time handling, deformation on surfaces, nodeID labels, nodal variables on boundaries, particle release time and residence time variables, neighbor counts, naming conventions and units to name a few.

Improved GLTF Export

The GLTF 2.0 file format is widely adopted in web based applications. Efficient transmission is critical in such situations. EnSight now supports a geometry compression option when exporting GLTF 2.0 files. The compression approach uses Google's Draco compression library. EnSight also provides tessellation resolution control for exporting nodes represented in quadratic shapes.

No Longer Copies Preference Files

EnSight uses a private preferences directory for each user. A number of different preference files that control EnSight defaults are stored in that directory and are read as EnSight starts up. In previous releases, in a fresh installation of a new release, EnSight always copies the preferences files from its previous release. EnSight stops doing so as of EnSight 2025 R1.

Removed Support for the STAR-CD and STAR-CCM+ Reader

EnSight no longer includes support for the STAR-CD and STAR-CCM+ Reader. If this reader is required, consider using 2022 R2 or an older release of EnSight that supports this reader.