Turbulence - scientific visualization animation

Hello,

here’s an artistic scientific visualization animation I made using Blender and Cycles:

I tried to find a way to visualize complex iso-surfaces generated from CFD simulation. In this case the iso-surface shows vorticity value 1000 1/s, to illustrate turbulence around a flying golf disc (forward speed 20 m/s, axial rotation 900 rpm). Video shows flight in slow motion (factor 0.0015 of real time).

Fluid simulation was carried out with OpenFOAM (www.openfoam.org). Vorticity iso-surface and particle tracers were generated in Paraview (www.paraview.org). Surface data was transferred to Blender in X3D format.

For rendering the iso-surface, I finally ended up combining a volumetric emission shader and emissive surface shader combined to transparent shader using “Facing Layer Weight” as factor to show only sideway edges. Since volumetric rendering requires manifold surfaces and consistent face normals (which Paraview fails to produce), I ended up writing a bunch of Python postprocessing in Blender, which tries to heal the imported iso-surface and calculate face normals. I’ll try to clean it and publish it as a Blender add-on.

Enjoy!

BR,
Tuomo

thats cool.. Do you know sebastian barschkis or jean-francois gallant? also known as sebbas or pyroevil? Im sure you know them. But maybe all of you should work together!

very interesting, looks very jellyfish like :slight_smile: