Computational Engineering International (CEI) says EnSight CFD 2.0, the latest version of the company’s CFD visualization software, is now available with a free version, a native Mac version, and practical volume rendering.

EnSight CFD 2.0 includes improvements to the visualization product such as: surface rendering with transparency, faster and less memory required for models that include polyhedral cells, and session files to save work and replay it on other datasets. Key enhancements are a free version, a Cocoa Mac version, both of the free and paid kind, and the inclusion of the volume rendering in both the free and paid versions.

Volume rendering is an important visualization technique which has until now been unavailable to the average engineer and scientist, according to the folks at CEI. EnSight CFD 2.0 brings this capability to the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for uses in aerodynamics, astrophysic.

A Mac Cocoa version was one of the primary goals of EnSight CFD 2.0 due to the high number of engineers conducting CFD analysis using Macs, and the preference among Mac users for native Cocoa applications over applications using the X11 toolkit common to Linux and Unix.

Finally,EnSight CFD 2.0 includes a free version. The limitations to the free version are that model sizes must be less than three million cells, a small logo appears on the screen, fewer data formats are supported, and there's no direct customer support. CEI is making this free version available in order to help engineering students, CFD solver developers who are often very small companies, and prospective customers. The free version is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. For more info go to the EnSight CFD 2.0 web page (http://www.ensightcfd.com).