Splotch: Visualizing Cosmological Simulations

TL;DR

Splotch is a fast, publicly available ray-tracer designed for effective visualization of cosmological simulation data, optimizing particle rendering through depth ordering and realistic emission-absorption modeling.

Contribution

The paper introduces Splotch, a novel, efficient visualization tool tailored for cosmological simulations, with optimized algorithms for rendering point-like data.

Findings

Enables realistic 3D visualizations of cosmological data.

Supports diverse datasets and configurations for varied visual outputs.

Available online for scientific and public use.

Abstract

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.