Custom Application

Computational Model Builder (CMB)
1

Can we create a custom application/gui using CMB like we can in ParaView?

2

Yes you can. In fact the CMB ModelBuilder application itself is mainly a custom branded ParaView application with a set of plugins.

Both ModelBuilder and the underlying toolkit (SMTK) are under a BSD open source license so they can be used in both open and close source projects.

3

Is there any documentation or github repo for such examples. I am new to it and want to build a simple gui that leverages certain features from CMB and Paraview

4

SMTK provides ParaView plugins that each expose different functionality within ParaView (extra dock panels, menus, behaviors for loading files, etc.). By choosing which plugins you package with your application, you can choose which functionality your application includes. See here for a description of SMTK’s ParaView plugin architecture.

The cmb-superbuild repo is how we build applications, and it is this repository that controls which plugins are distributed with a given application. An example is the cmb-2d application. It includes all of the plugins SMTK provides except for the two listed here.

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5

In addition to standard ParaView plugins, the most common way people customize the application (called “modelbuilder”) is by developing a CMB plugin with additional functionality specific to the solver(s) of interest. What simulation codes are you are working with?

There are a number of working examples in the CMB Plugins repository, including the cmb-2d example David pointed to. You can get a general look at how modelbuilder works with that particular plugin at https://cmb2d.readthedocs.io.

Thanks for your interest in CMB.

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6

I have my own simulation of Mechanical Bodies written in C++, all I want is to create a GUI which takes in file from the user, apply boundary conditions to it, select regions and apply forces to the body, do meshing and then pass this body to my simulation.

7

For the simple case you describe, you can get started without developing a plugin.

1. Are you aware that you can download the CMB modelbuilder application? The public folder is at this location. I recommend you start by going to the 23.01 release subfolder here and downloading the package for your OS. Unzip that somewhere convenient on your machine and try running the modelbuilder executable that is in bin folder.

2. To assign boundary conditions and forces, you would create an SMTK template file, which is an XML formatted file specifying the various simulation parameters to display in the modelbuilder UI.

3. For 3D meshing, we don’t have a standard connection (the cmb-2d connects to a 2D mesher, as the name implies). In the past, we have connected modelbuilder to Gmsh using their docker image. I think I can track down a working example here if you want to try that.

4. The “final” step is to write a Python script to generate the input file(s) that you solver reads. That Python script would use our API to traverse the data entered for your BCs and load conditions. Referring to the cmb-2d code again, the script to generate its input file starts at https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmb/plugins/cmb-2d/-/blob/master/simulation-workflows/CMB2D.py (which imports another python script in a subdirectory).

I hope this is enough to get you started,

8

Thank you so much for a detailed response, appreciate it! One last question, would I be able to link this to my own simulation? As I said I want to use CMB as a preprocessing tool and after doing meshing I want to pass my object (In the form of Matrix) to my own simulation and then display the results of my simulation back to modelBuilder

9

You can definitely integrate solvers into the modelbuilder application.

  • In most cases, we run the solver as a separate executable that we launch in a background process from modelbuilder, and transfer data through the file system. I can point you to several examples with different levels of integration. With our recent implementation of wind tunnel simulation (link), you launch OpenFOAM applications by clicking a button we added to modelbuilder (with a plugin).
  • It sounds like you might instead be interested in compiling your solver directly into modelbuilder? That is also doable, but would require you to go through the CMB build steps – starting with the cmb-superbuild as David described yesterday.
10

I think for now I could work with either of the two options.
Thank you so much again. I will go through all these resources and try to see how I can create my application. Thanks again

11

Just to confirm when you said open the file in modelBuilder you meant to open the .sbt file, right? I am trying to do that but nothing shows up. So just wanted to confirm

12

Sorry to hear that. Yes, you should be able to open the .sbt file and see a simple UI in the Attribute Editor tab. I am not able to duplicate the problem here. Using linux (Ubuntu 21.04):

  • I downloaded and unzipped the modelbuilder-23.01.-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz file.
  • And I cloned the cmb-2d repository
  • I started modelbuilder and used the File -> Open... menu to open the simulation-workflows/CMB2D.sbt file.

Here’s what I get in the Attribute Editor

image

One thing to double-check is that the toggle button to automatically apply changes is set. In the screenshot, that is in the first toolbar row, the 10th icon from the left.

Another thing to try is to check the Properties view. I don’t think it is displayed be default, so you might have to go to the View menu to display it. Once it’s open, check for the Apply button at the top of the view – it should be disabled.

You didn’t mention so, but are there any messages in the Output Messages view?

Finally, if you aren’t using linux, let me know what platform you are on and I’ll try that one tomorrow.

13

Thanks again, it wasn’t updating itself. Once I selected automatically apply changes it worked. Sorry I am new to it.
And I am using MacOS.
Will I be able to create my own executable that has my custom modelBuilder application and the simulation? Do I need to build modelBuilder from the source for this?

14

By this I mean, the users don’t have to upload my .sbt file instead whenever the run the .exe file and opens my application they would see the modified UI already set for my application

15

For this you will need to create a plugin. If your plugin

  1. contains an operation that creates an attribute resource with your custom SBT file, and
  2. uses a Registrar to register the operation with the operation manager and the smtk::operation::CreatorGroup, then the File→New… menu will let users create a new template for your simulation automatically.

See here for an example.

16

Thanks for the update. The automatically-apply option should be set by default – I’ll see if we can fix that in future releases.

And yes, you can create your own executable with custom modelbuilder and your simulation code. And yes, to do that you will need to build modelbuilder from source. It is not always easy, but to give it a try, I would start by building the standard modelbuilder without your customization.

  • The ninja build system might be required on macOS, but even if it’s not, I would highly recommend using it.
  • Clone the cmb-superbuild repository which we use to build modelbuilder and its dependencies.
  • One of the libraries modelbuilder uses is Qt 5.15. Install that separately on your machine. I don’t use macOS alot, but I am pretty sure there is a homebrew formula for qt@5.
  • After installing Qt 5.15, run cmake for the cmb-superbuild, and set USE_SYSTEM_qt5 to ON and Qt5_DIR to the Qt5 directory in your Qt install tree. I think the directory is at <qt-install-dir>/5.15.2/<compiler>/lib/cmake/Qt5).
  • I would use the cmake defaults for the other options, at least until you get a working build.
  • The build process can take awhile. Don’t be surprised if it takes more than an hour.
17

The most common way we embed application specifics like this uses the CMB “project” feature to manage the underlying resources cohesively. Both the cmb-2d and wind-tunnel examples use projects.

  • When the user creates a new project, the attribute editor is automatically loaded with the .sbt contents. The user can then import their model and set the BCs etc.
  • A project is opened, closed, and saved as a single integrated entity.