Help with Plugin Installation for Sandia Cubit

[woodapple2]

I have installed the latest Cubit version from Sandia (Version 16.14.1) for Windows and having trouble figuring out how to install the plugins.

There does not seem to be a Tools -> Plugins option as described in the installation instructions.

I am guessing this is a difference between the Corefoam Cubit and the Sandia Cubit. I have also tried the "Manually Install The Plugin" instructions where I copied pasted the plugin file into the bin/plugins directory. However, this doesn't appear to have been sufficient as I don't get the output described when entering help dagmc in the Cubit Command Line box. I have been looking through the Cubit Gui and have not been able to find any options to install or activate a plugin.

Could the issue be version incompatibility? Looking in Releases, the latest version of the Windows plugin corresponds to a "unknown" Sandia Cubit version.

I have never used Cubit before and what led me here was a search for a 3D visualization tools for MCNP geometry, which I am hoping will be possible through the mcnp2cad plugin. I am aware that VISED can do 3D plots, but my experience is that VISED is very buggy and often doesn't work for models that run perfectly fine in MCNP5/6 and VISED 3D plotting capability is quite limited and not easy to use. Hence, my desire to find an alternate 3D plotting option for MCNP models.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

[gonuke]

Thanks for reaching out @woodapple2

It is true that the instructions are for Coreform Cubit and not Sandia cubit. I'll have to double check if the particular version of Sandia Cubit you have noted is compatible with the Coreform versions for which we have a pre compiled plugin to share.

[woodapple2]

@gonuke Thank you for your quick response and for looking into this for me. I do have access to other Cubit versions (15.2 15.4, 15.5, 15.6, 15.7, 15.8, 16.02.3, 16.04.1, 16.08.2, 16.10.0, 16.12.0, and 16.12.1), so I could try installing one of those if you think it would help.

[woodapple2]

@gonuke Have you gotten a chance to look into what Windows' versions of Cubit are compatible? Thank you for your help.

[gonuke]

Unfortunately, I'm not able to get a clear answer on that. I recommend you reach out the Sandia and Coreform cubit teams. Support for this plugin is being integrated into Coreform Cubi as a first-class capability. Hopefully, it will also find its way into Sandia cubit quickly.

I think that the Coreform Cubit team was working on a version of he plugin that will be compatible with Sandia 16.12 in late October, so it may be part of what ships with Coreform Cubit 2023.11. You can reach out to Coreform to confirm

[woodapple2]

Thank you for the update.

[woodapple2]

I wanted to report back on my status incase anyone else finds themselves in a similar situation. I have reached out to Sandia Cubit support and unfortunately have not been able to get a clear answer on if it is possible for Sandia Cubit to support this plugin or have it directly incorporate its feature as has been done with Corefoam Cubit. It seems unlikely that this will happen any time soon if ever. It may be worthwhile updating the README for this git project as it currently implies that either Sandia Cubit or Corefoam Cubit would work.

I did obtain a free trial of Corefoam Cubit and I have been mostly successful in converting a MCNP model to CAD for visualization. Unfortunately, it is looking like the Corefoam Cubit license cost is too high for my specific use case where I am only interested in the mcnp2cad feature.

@gonuke, I wanted to ask you whether it would be possible to repurpose mcnp2cad to be a standalone application? I have limited programing experience (mostly in Python), so I would greatly appreciate any advice regarding the difficulty of this undertaking.

Thank you for your time.

[gonuke]

The challenge with repurposing MCNP2CAD is that it requires an implementation of iGeom to interface with some CAD engine. Within the plugin, it used a minimal implementation of iGeom to interface with the ACIS CAD engine exposed in Cubit.

It should be possible, in theory, to write an iGeom interface to OpenCascade, but that's not something I can support right now.

It should also be possible, in theory, to bypass iGeom and modify MCNP2CAD to directly interface with OpenCascade's interface. This would perhaps be easier than above (and still not something I can support) but would narrow the applicability.

[woodapple2]

@gonuke, thank you for the advice. It sounds like making MCNP2CAD a stand alone application would require significant effort. While I would like to learn more about OpenCascade to see if I could accomplish the second option you mentioned, this would be a significant time investment (more than I can currently afford) considering my more limited programming experience. Time permitted, I might revisit this in the future. If I do ever make headway on this, I will share with you. Similarly, please let me know if the situation changes in the future such that either this plugin becomes operable with Sandia Cubit or MCNP2CAD becomes useable outside of Corefoam Cubit (e.g., standalone application).

Thank you again for all the help.