Visualization Techniques for Data on 3D Grids: Raleigh-Taylor Simulation Example

Simulations of physical processes are frequently used to study a continuous three-dimensional volume. In order to apply computational methods, the continuous volume is approximated by a discrete grid. Simulations are typically organized to compute variables at each location on the three-dimensional grid. Visualizing the results requires exploring the data with a variety of presentation techniques. Our movie illustrates applying these techniques to a dataset generated by a Raleigh-Taylor astrophysics simulation. However, these general-purpose approaches can be applied to a 3D compute grid produced by other applications. We have implemented the visualization using the VisIt software, based on the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), with Python scripting.