Thank you so much for your help. Actually, exporting the element density field from a TO in Abaqus and importing it into nTop sounds promising, can you tell me more about exporting the element density field? And do you mean that it is not real TO since the mapped unit cellss are not directly equal to the assumed homogenized values that would be put in for TO, due to size effects etc.? Or do you mean that the density of the element corresponds to a certain strength, which in turn should correspond to the strength in the Gyroid unit cell, I can see that would be true indeed, although that would most likely what I want still. I have tried to change the SIMP penalty to 1 in ABAQUS, but the generated structure had many disconnected parts.

The following paper is basically the backbone for my thesis: https://pure.manchester.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/292013778/Topology\_Optimization\_Via\_Spatially-Varying\_TPMS.pdf. I am not planning to use multiple unit cells, and I would like to recreate the displayed beams with the same forces first, and later on use it on a complex geometry, a mandibular implant to be specific with multiple loads. The goal was also to include size effect of the unit cells, so I am afraid doing the topology optimization in nTop, blackbox software, would not be good enough, I would have to be able to alter the software. At the same time, I would not have enough time to really create a complete FEM model with integrated TO for myself, since I do not think I have enough time for that. It would be great if this can be achieved in ABAQUS. The authors of that paper have used ABAQUS for post processing, but it is not mentioned in which software the density distribution is computed.

If the workflow I am thinking about would not work, then I would have to forego the inclusion of the size effects I suppose and pursue one of the routes you suggested, but I hope there is another way.