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GiD Preprocess makes a discretization of the object under study and generates a mesh of elements, each one of which is assigned a material and some conditions. This preprocessing information in GiD (mesh, materials, and conditions) enables the calculating module to generate results. For the present example, the calculating module will find the distance of each element relative to the center of mass of the object.
Finally, the results generated by the calculating module will be read and visualized in GiD Post-process.
Diagram of the workflow
GiD must adapt these data to deal with them. Materials, boundary and/or load conditions, and general problem data must be defined.
The calculating module (in this example cmas2d.exe) solves the equations in the problem and saves the results in the results file. This module may be programmed in the language of your choice, 'C' is used in this example
GiD Post-process reads the following files generated by the calculating module:
project_name.post.res: results file.
Each element of the mesh corresponds to a value.
project_name.post.msh: file containing the post-process mesh. If this file does not exist, GiD uses the preprocess mesh also for postprocess.
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This window helps you to generate a random 4 sided surface. For this example let's click Random surface and get an auto-generated surface. You can click continue and create your own surface. This is the surface I'll work with:
After this, let's open the properties tree. Go to Data --> Data tree.
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