The principal difficulty in using the EnSight reader lies in the fact that EnSight expects that a case to be defined by the contents of a particular file, rather than a directory as it is in OpenFOAM. Table 6.1: Environment variable settings for EnSight. With a standard user setup, only $CEI _HOME may need to be set manually, to the path of the EnSight installation. The environment variables associated with EnSight are prefixed by $CEI _ or $ENSIGHT7 _ and listed in Table 6.1. The settings are made in the bashrc (or cshrc) file in the $WM _PROJECT _DIR/etc/apps/ensightFoam directory. In order to run the EnSight reader, it is necessary to set some environment variables correctly. It is this library that EnSight needs to use which means that it must be able to locate it on the filing system as described in the following section. OpenFOAM includes its own reader module ensightFoamReader that is compiled into a library named libuserd-foam.
For a given case, foamToEnsight is executed like any normal application. The foamToEnsight utility converts data from OpenFOAM to EnSight file format.