When a FEM is built in 3dx and the .inp is subsequently exported to my local machine via Export->Simulation, A/CAE is unable to successfully read in this .inp file without a huge amount of errors. Errors are returned for several entities, for example *orientations. Does anyone know if there is any plan to make the .inps compatible between 3dx and A/CAE? Seems like it should be since its all SIMULIA.
Having that said, most of the time a 3dx generated .inp can be exported to my local machine and ran successfully via cmd - A/Standard, and then .odb can be read into A/CAE or A/Viewer. However, this isn't always the case. I've seen errors from the external A/Standard solver (note the same model was successfully ran in 3dx) due to having too long entity names (3dx names ply sections using a string of the product - 3dpart - 3dshape etc), due to having commas in entity names, or since. Is 3dx running the same A/Standard solver that A/CAE pushes to? The aforementioned makes me think its not 100 percent the same.
Note the reason I generally export the inps and run external to the platform is because for large models (4 million+ DOF) , the importing results step and save step within 3dx (both when the results are saved on the cloud and when the results are saved locally) takes on the order of several hours, whereas saving the same .odb to my hard drive after running locally only takes a few minutes. Other reasons would be to take advantage of functionality that exists within CAE but is not yet integrated into 3dx (i.e. sub modelling). For small / basic models, I keep the whole workflow in 3dx and rarely have issues.
