Meaningful colouring of spectral cube data with volume rendering
Project description
About shwirl
shwirl is a custom standalone Python program to visualise spectral data cubes with ray-tracing volume rendering. The program has been developed to investigate transfer functions and graphics shaders as enablers for scientific visualisation of astronomical data. Details about transfer functions and shaders developed and implemented in shwirl can be found in a full length article by Vohl, Fluke, Barnes & Hassan (Submitted).
A transfer function is an arbitrary function that combines volumetric elements (or voxels) to set the colour, intensity, or transparency level of each pixel in the final image. A graphics shader is an algorithmic kernel used to compute several properties of the final image such as colour, depth, and/or transparency. Shaders are particularly suited to computing transfer functions, and are an integral part of the graphics pipeline on Graphics Processing Units.
The program utilises [Astropy](http://www.astropy.org) to handle FITS files and World Coordinate System, [Qt](http://www.qtcentre.org) (and [PyQt](https://www.riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqt/download5)) for the user interface, and [VisPy](http://vispy.org), an object-oriented Python visualisation library binding onto OpenGL. We implemented the algorithms in the fragment shader using the GLSL language.
The software has been tested on Linux, Mac, and Windows machines, including remote desktop on cloud computing infrastructure. While the software is available for download and ready to visualise data, this is not intended as a full software release just yet.
Documentation
Documentation can be found at [readthedocs](http://shwirl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).
Installation
You need Qt5, PyQt5. See documentation for more details.
pip
When Qt and PyQt is installed, you can install via pip, e.g.
pip3 install shwirl
and run with
shwirl
Issues, requests and general inquiries
Please send issues, feature requests and/or general inquiries to Dany Vohl via http://macrocosme.github.io/#contact. You can also simply open a [new issue](https://github.com/macrocosme/shwirl/issues) on github directly.
License
shwirl is licensed under the terms of the (new) BSD license. A copy of the license is included within this repository.
Copyright
Copyright (c) 2015, Dany Vohl All rights reserved.
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