- From the main SIM menu (upper left corner), select Settings.
- In the Settings dialog, review the settings on the tabs to set up your simulation environment.
General tab
- Units – Change the system of units if desired. The solver system of units, Metric (kg/mm/s), SI (kg/m/s), or US-English systems of units (lb/in/hr) is defined on the Units reference page. If you have an open project and change the units here, the units will change throughout the dialogs and displays, such as in the Heat Treatment temperatures and the Browser display of hot spots and lack of fusion. For temperatures, the Metric option uses Celsius, SI uses Kelvin, and US-English uses Fahrenheit.
- Reverse zoom direction – by default scrolling the mouse wheel towards your hand zooms out. Checking this box reverses this.
- Highlighting when selected, highlights items in the browser.
- Language – Select the language to be used in the user interface. You will need to restart Simulation Utility to see the effect of a language change.
- Show startup dialog – by default this option is checked, which brings up the splash screen upon startup.
- Display warning message if Graphics Card is not supported – Select this if you want
Simulation Utility to check the graphics card on the computer, and display the following warning message if it is not supported:
- Display warning message if parallel local solves attempted – Select this option if you want users to see the following warning message if they start another solve while one is already running:
- Prompt for converted model units – Enables the display of the Converted Model Units dialog when a part is imported.
Libraries tab
Shows the current path to the libraries of process parameter (PRM) files and physical materials. You can change these paths if required. On a Windows computer, the default location for both libraries is C:/Users/<user name>/Documents/Simulation Utility for Netfabb
Warning: After generating, scaling, or importing custom PRM files, or adding materials to the repository, changing the location of the processing parameters or materials library will remove the custom PRM files or material properties.
Display tab
Allows you to adjust Ambient Occlusion settings for improved rendering of parts.
Solver tab
Use these settings to control various aspects of the solver behavior:
- Executable - By default the path to the solver executable is automatically determined. Change this path only if the incorrect directory is detected.
- Max threads - upon installation the number of physical processors will be determined. This can be manually reduced to take up fewer system resources if desired, at the expense of longer simulation times. Press the green arrow refresh button to reset to the automatically detected settings.
Warning: Using non-physical cores (hyper-threaded processors) slows the solver down and is strongly discouraged.
- KMP Stacksize - this environment variable sets the number of bytes to allocate for each OpenMP thread to use as its private stack.
- Perform Memory Check - toggles on and off the pre simulation Memory Check which warns if the current geometry and mesh settings will exceed the available RAM of the system.
- Perform Disk Check - turns on or off a pre simulation disk check which ensures the hard drive used for the simulation will not negatively impact the computational time.
- Memory Management - Allows the user to control how the solver makes use of the work station's RAM:
- Automatically adjust memory settings - This is the default setting and is suggested for most users and systems. The solver will estimate at the beginning of each simulation the memory requirements for that simulation and adjust the off core options as necessary.
- Off-core processing stage 1 - This option will write select matricies to the hard disk instead of RAM. This allows for the solution of problems too large to run in memory, but at the cost of a small reduction in speed.
- Off-core processing stage 2 - This option will write most of the solution matricies to the hard disk instead of RAM. This allows for solving problems of even greater complexity and size than allowed by the installed memory, but will increase computational time.
- No off-core processing - This option will always run in memory. This ensures the greatest computational efficiency and run times, but should only be enabled for systems with 120+ GB RAM installed.
Preview tab
If present, this tab allows you to enable new functionality that is under development in the product. In so doing, you are invited to submit comments to the developers about your experience with the new features. These functions are only available for users with a licensed version of Autodesk Netfabb Local Simulation.
