AstroBlend: An astrophysical visualization package for Blender

Abstract

The rapid growth in scale and complexity of both computational and observational astrophysics over the past decade necessitates efficient and intuitive methods for examining and visualizing large datasets. Here, I present AstroBlend, an open-source Python library for use within the three dimensional modeling software, Blender. While Blender has been a popular open-source software among animators and visual effects artists, in recent years it has also become a tool for visualizing astrophysical datasets. AstroBlend combines the three dimensional capabilities of Blender with the analysis tools of the widely used astrophysical toolset, yt, to afford both computational and observational astrophysicists the ability to simultaneously analyze their data and create informative and appealing visualizations. The introduction of this package includes a description of features, work flow, and various example visualizations. A website -www.astroblend.com -has been developed which includes tutorials, and a gallery of example images and movies, along with links to downloadable data, three dimensional artistic models, and various other resources.

Cinematic Visualization of Multiresolution Data: Ytini for Adaptive Mesh Refinement in Houdini

“…Recent work at the intersection of science and cinema aims to partially address this divide between categories of tools by creating scientific plugins into the 3D computer graphics software, Blender (Kent 2015;Taylor 2015;Naiman 2016). Blender is more accessible to researchers than some other artistic tools for approaching cinematic visualization due to being free and open-source.…”

Houdini for Astrophysical Visualization

“…In a similar vein to methods utilized to bring the visualization techniques of Blender to the astronomical community (Taylor 2015;Kent 2015;Naiman 2016), this section will focus on several methods of using Houdini to visualize astronomical data for a specific dataset from O' Shea et al (2004).…”

“…Recent inroads which utilize three dimensional modeling and game development software make the possibility of outreach materials generated by a myriad of individual scientists, rather than a few graphics studios, an exciting new avenue to be explored (Kent 2015;Taylor 2015;Naiman 2016). As technological advancements in graphics and gaming progress, the scientist is presented with innovative methods to further develop their own public outreach (Vogt & Shingles 2013;Steffen et al 2014;Vogt et al 2014;Brown et al 2014;Madura et al 2015).…”

A Case Study in Astronomical 3D Printing: The MysteriousηCarinae

“…By taking time to be the third spatial variable, Aragón-Calvo was able to more easily identify and track tridimensional cosmic structures in his simulations. Naiman (2016) has additionally demonstrated how the 3-D modeling software blender can be used for astronomy data visualization and the generation of 3-D printable isosurfaces that are based on the results of 3-D simulations (see their fig. 9).…”