How to add Ansys airflow results in Vuforia Studio?

[Nicolae90]

Hello,

I saw some videos on youtube where the simualtion results where visible in augmented reality.

Could someone please explain how to achieve this? For example which format must be exported from Ansys so that it can be imported into Vuforia Studio?

Thank you !

[RolandRaytchev]

Hi @Nicolae90 ,

I also did not have information currently what is the exact implementation and what  widget or model is  used for the Vuforia  presentation of air flow / or in generally for fluid simulation.  From my level of knowledge I think there are two ways to implement it in Studio

1.) adding some additional geometry in pvz model and animating geometry – but did not see such example model yet

2.) using some shaders which will represent the air flow / or other fluid geometry

I did some search in the community and found some related posts which should be helpful:

1.)How to add streamlines from Creo Flow Analysis?

2.)Simulating Fluid Flow in Studio Experience

3.)Show Fluid Flow Passages

 

So expecialy in the post 2.)  by AllanThompson we can find:

"You can also show CFD results from the Creo Flow Analysis in AR.  At LiveWorx this year it seemed like all the PTC stands were showing this in some form.  It's easy to get the streamlines out, but the animation effect is obtained by using a custom shader and PTC hasn't shared that yet.  I"m hoping that will change (I've been asking).  You can see more details in this thread here: How to add streamlines from Creo Flow Analysis?"

And further in the link:

 "in the latest versions of Creo 5.0 (5.0.1.0) and Creo 4.0 (M050) there is the option to Export the streamlines from the results:

This allows you to export an OBJ or a PVZ of the streamlines.  From what the PTC guys told me the rest of it is then done in Studio using some custom shaders, but I don't have the details on them unfortunately.

We've done some other work on this a while ago using the Vuforia SDK (now called Vuforia Engine) to bring in CFD results from ANSYS and overlay them on the physical product. "

=====

So, what I believe here is that we can get form the CFD (Creo Parametric module Flow Analysis) some solids of the flows. They seem to be in generally static and the movement of them are done by shaders.   To define a shader we need to use Web.GL -  web-based GLSL to write a fragment and vertex shader as Javascript and insert it to a TML text widget in Studio . Then users can set the shader property of a surface or modelItem to such shader to have some dynamic effects.

 … But the definition of such shaders required some deep knowledge in GLSL.  I think definitely some shader are already implemented @PTC but unfortunately, I do not have information about the specific javascript implementation. 

[Nicolae90]

Thanks Roland!

I saw a video there with a supercharger, where some static airflow lines were shown. I would also be interested in that, even though it is not something dynamic. And I think that those results where imported from Ansys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bof5v8i35Ek

[AllanThompson]

As a PTC and ANSYS reseller, we've got access to all the various tools, so this is how we did the supercharger example.

The CFD was run in ANSYS Fluent as static (dynamic is really complex for this type of thing) and the results were taken into ANSYS Ensight and exported out to a glTF file.  This was then opened up in Windows Paint 3D (crazy I know) and exported as an FBX file, which can then be brought into Studio.

It seems that the conversion from glTF to FBX via Paint 3D messes up the scale, so in Studio, I always have to apply some weird scale value to fit the CFD results to the CAD geometry, but we've done quite a few different examples of showing flow lines in AR and the process works well.  Maybe Blender or some other tool would be better and not mess up the scale, but we've not tried that at this stage.

The dynamic results that you can see in some of the other posts that I've made were done in Vuforia Engine.  I've done some playing around with showing dynamic results in Studio and did it by getting an export of the 3D results at each frame, bringing them all into Creo Illustrate and creating a sequence to turn on one frame at a time.  It works OK, but can be quite time consuming and you can end up with a very large PVZ file, depending on what you're trying to show.

We did also look at using JS in Studio to load/unload and show/hide the different 3D geometry "frames" but the performance on the viewing device (10.5 inch iPad Pro) wasn't really quick enough.

The FEA results that get shown in the video are a PVZ file exported straight out of Creo Simulate.  It's much simpler to get these in.

Hope this helps.

Allan

[Nicolae90]

Thanks for your reply Allan, that was useful information!

I used the Creo Flow Analysis module, and exported the results as a .pvz, but it did not retain the colors. Do you know if there are some special export options that need to be selected?

[AllanThompson]

Unfortunately there's no option to export out the flow lines from Creo CFD with colour.  See here for some other details.

I tried it just now in Creo 6.0.2.0 and it still exports without any colour - OBJ or PVZ so unfortunately the only way to do it would be to use a shader in Studio like PTC have done, but unfortunately I don't have the details on that.  I imagine there's a fair bit of work in it because the PVZ file of the flow lines that you can export out doesn't have any structure tree.  So you'd need to extract out the PVZ and then re-assemble all the OL files and somehow individually apply the correct colour to them.