We present a light and fast, public available, ray-tracer {\tt Splotch} software tool which supports the effective visualization of cosmological simulations data. We describe the algorithm it relies on, which is designed in order to deal with point-like data, optimizing the ray-tracing calculation by ordering the particles as a function of their ``depth'' defined as a function of one of the coordinates or other associated parameter. Realistic three-dimensional impressions are reached through a composition of the final color in each pixel properly calculating emission and absorption of individual volume elements. We describe several scientific as well as public applications realized with {\tt Splotch}. We emphasize how different datasets and configurations lead to remarkable different results in terms of the images and animations. A few of these results are available online.
@article{arxiv.0807.1742,
title = {Splotch: Visualizing Cosmological Simulations},
author = {K. Dolag and M. Reinecke and C. Gheller and S. Imboden},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0807.1742},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
19 Pages, 8 Figures, to appear in New Journal of Physics, Focus Issue on "Visualisation in Physics", edited by B. Sanders, T. Senden and V. Springel