Determine the best location for saving new material files.
When Simulation Composite Analysis is installed, a pre-populated material library is installed in two locations: to a folder named "Materials" in the Autodesk installation directory and to %APPDATA%\Autodesk\Simulation Composite Analysis 2015.1\Materials. This second directory is set as the default location to look for material files and is the correct location in which to save created mdata files. If files are saved in a different location, you must change the location that Simulation Composite Analysis searches for material files. This location can be changed by changing a variable within the Simulation Composite Analysis environment file. This environment file is located in the Autodesk installation directory. The name of the environment file is:
asca.env
For Windows, the contents of the environment file will look like:
&ASCA_ENV MATERIAL_FILE_DIR = '<%APPDATA%\Autodesk\Simulation Composite Analysis 2015.1\Materials\>' /
For Linux, the contents of the environment file will look like:
&ASCA_ENV MATERIAL_FILE_DIR = '<%APPDATA%\Autodesk\Simulation Composite Analysis 2015.1\Materials\>' LICENSE_THIN_CLIENT = 1 /
The MATERIAL_FILE_DIR variable can be modified to reflect the location you wish for the product to search for material files. If no materials are found in the specified MATERIAL_FILE_DIR, Simulation Composite Analysis will proceed to look in the following:
Located in the materials directory is a file called ASCAMatDB.xml. This file maps all of the material names to material ids since material ids are used to reference materials by ANSYS. Whenever Simulation Composite Analysis saves a new material, it automatically updates the ASCAMatDB.xml file. As such, it is necessary to have an ASCAMatDB.xml file in the directory in which the material will be saved.