Exporting ACIS Files

Geometry can be exported from within CUBIT to the ACIS "sat" (ASCII) and "sab" (binary) formats. These formats can be used to exchange geometry between ACIS-compliant applications. The command used to export geometry is:

Export Acis [Debug] 'filename' [<geometry_entity_list>] [Binary|Ascii] [Current] [Overwrite]

The filename should be enclosed in single or double quotes. By convention, binary and ASCII ACIS files use the .sab and .sat filename extensions, respectively. If a geometry entity list is not specified, the entire ACIS model is exported. A geometry entity list is specified in the same format used for other CUBIT commands (See Entity Specification). Note that the model is saved as manifold geometry, and will have that representation when imported back into CUBIT (See Non-Manifold Topology and Geometry Merging.)

When exporting, the filename extension will determine the default file type, either ASCII or binary. A .sat extension will default to ASCII; a .sab extension will default to binary. If you use a different file extension you can specify the type with the [binary|ascii] option (with an unsupported extension exporting will default to ASCII but importing requires the type to be specified). Binary files can be significantly faster but are not guaranteed to be upward compatible nor cross-platform compatible (although testing has determined compatibility between NT and HP/UX).

In the GUI version, the current option will set the default filename for autosave (cntrl-S or File->Save (auto inc)) to the imported filename. Also, the filename is then set in the window titlebar.

When exporting with the "file overwrite" option on, the software will check to see if the file exists already, and if it does, exporting will fail in the command line version or ask to confirm the overwrite in the GUI version of CUBIT. The overwrite option will override this option and overwrite the file. The "file overwrite" option defaults to ON in the GUI version, OFF in the command line version.

When exporting, you can set the version of the Acis geometry. This allows backwards compatibility to previous versions of Cubit or other Acis-based applications. The command to change the Acis geometry engine version is:

Set Geometry Version [version_number]

where version_number can be one of the following:106, 107, 201, 300, 301, 401, 402, 403, 500, 501, 502, 503, 600, 601, 602, 603, 700, 701, 702, 703, 704, 705, 800, 1007, 1100, 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800, 1900, 2100, 2200, 2401, 2502. Note that you cannot set a version number that is higher than that of your current engine. For example, Cubit 6.0 was based on Acis 6.2, so you cannot set a geometry version of 700.

To retain any merging information during export of an ACIS file, set attribute on and set attribute off need to be used before and after the export acis command.