I’ve been working on a small results viewer for CalculiX and figured it’s in good enough shape to share. It’s called ccxview.
The main goal was speed. I got tired of waiting for big .frd files to load, so I wrote something that opens them quickly and stays responsive while rotating and switching fields. A model with around a million elements loads in about a second on my machine, and fields are only decoded when you actually look at them.
It reads .frd, .inp, .dat and cgx .fbd files. You can open an .inp on its own to check the mesh, sets, loads and supports before running, or with the .frd next to it to see both together.
There’s a Linux binary, a Windows .exe, and a WebAssembly build that runs in the browser, so you can try it without installing anything:
It has no external dependencies. It’s plain C99, and everything else is a handful of single-header libraries vendored into the repo (sokol, Nuklear, stb and a couple of others).
Some of what it does:
handles most element types, including shells, beams, springs, gaps, contact and ties
shows Gauss point values, optionally taken straight from the .dat file
animates mode shapes and steps
compares two runs (A minus B)
has path plots, clip planes, mirror symmetry and a probe
plots convergence from .sta/.cvg files
exports to PNG, MP4, CSV and VTK for ParaView
I built a most of this with the help of Claude Code.
Thanks,
yes, I was using it for my own models but then I thought it could be useful for others.
It is still in alpha, so there might be some bugs and features missing.
I’ll make sure to add your requests to the todo list.
it seems AI helps widely used by many developers today, a bit strange indeed in conditions of build tools with a tool. Stability depends on user feedback and reporting bugs; maintainability is main developer and contributor probably.
at first time i’m trying only miss one in light theme.
looks great, also Ansi-C language programing is the same with original CGX made it possible to porting in capability to build a model and mesh using fbd files maybe.
Ok, thanks for the feedback. I’ll be fixing/doing these soon as some are pretty straightforward.
Regarding rotation: I might add a second mode with a rotation around the cursor.
I tend to rotate then pan to the view I want.
Also I should mention the fly mode (activated using G key) which is basically first-person shooter kinda mode that helps fly around the model using WASD keys.
it’s available currently, several colormaps can be select in legend menus., plot also can be unaveraging. Here only me is missing in Rainbow Desaturated, hopely it will be available too.
i read in design spec, this is available also. Since it calls directly CGX in the background then all commands already supported and manual document still applicable. Maybe an addition of integrated text editor like SciTE from bConverged can be useful.
hi, i’m trying to add more colormap by modify render.cfiles in CCXview for similarity with CGX. Five colormaps added: Inferno, Jet, Grayscale, Rainbow-desaturated & Classic. Not yet tested personally due to lack experiences in compiling of complex large programs, but it should work w/o minor correction probably, thank you.
Ok, indeed. I couldn’t find them because the default one is “Fast”, so I thought it was a performance mode setting or something like that.
The GUI still needs some polish, but I’m mostly waiting for improved rotation. Currently, it feels like turntable mode in FreeCAD with one axis constrained. Free orbiting would be much better.
Also, it seems that recently opened files are not remembered between the sessions. And it would be good if the settings were remembered too so that we don’t have to adjust them each time.
my old days learning basic of c/cpp, indeed it’s lack of GUI for specific OpenGL visualization program work in cross platform. Some interesting me is NanoGUI from the creator of Mitsuba rendered, but i don’t know about feasibility and compatibility with CCXview.
Thanks for all the feedback. Most requests are now in:
Free orbit and orbit about the cursor, light theme, Jet/Inferno/Rainbow desaturated colour maps, out-of-range colours, a filled clip plane, smaller support glyphs, a new icon, and settings and recent files are remembered
Principal stresses and strains, cylindrical coordinates, cyclic expansion, history plots, unit systems
ASME stress linearization along a path or along the surface normal (it needs more testing since I only tested it on a tiny slab and the vessel example)
.fbd meshing without cgx (mapped meshes) (this one needs more testing!)
The binaries in the repo are updated.
On NanoGUI: it’s C++ and needs GLFW, NanoVG and CMake. ccxview is meant to stay plain C99 with a few single-header libraries: it builds with one compiler command and runs as one file on Windows, Linux and the web. So I’ll keep polishing the Nuklear GUI instead.
Incredible, thanks for your efforts! Is there a new release available to download?
I could test today the stress linearization results against Mecway FEA. If I remeber well in the Pveng site there are some available/documented cases as well.
First at all, I´m not an specialist!!! I have compared the results of the stress linearization in a common and documented case from PVeng:
Mecway and others if I remember well only give one result for the stress linearization, but in CCXview we have start and end node results. Then, some values agree with calculated from Mecway but choosing the start or end node, and not is always the same.
Maybe you could give us some light in this (incredible fast implemented) feature, that guess that will bring a lot of user´s attention.
EDITED: If I have understood well, Mecway is reporting the maximun value along the SCL, maybe in Ccxview could be added a third column “max along SCL”.
