Astrophysics SPH visualization question

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Hi, I’m new to blender and to this forum. I’ve started using Blender because I think it will help me make some beautiful scientific visualizations. To-date, I’ve been using IDL which is excellent to a point, but having seen some of the ‘fire’ effects in Blender, I’m excited for what might be possible.

As a new user, I can’t post links, but if you search for ‘cataclysmic variable’ you’ll find pictures of close binary stars with fluid flow between them, by way of an accretion disk. I do hydrodynamic simulations of those accretion flows using smoothed particle hydrodynamics codes (Fortran). If you search “Matt Wood Visualization” you’ll find the kind of visualizations I’ve been able to do so far.

A single particle in my simulations is injected at a certain point, spirals in though the accretion disk, and then is removed from the simulation when it gets close enough to the ‘primary star’. A new particle with the same index number is immediately re-injected into the simulation, so there’s a constant number of particles in the simulation.

So I’d like to read in my SPH output files, and visualize the motions using the smoke/fire effect I’ve seen (e.g., the flame thrower that Price did), and to key the ‘temperature’ to my luminosity value. I think with the 25,000 - 100,000 particles in the simulation, it would look fantastic.

So, my questions would be: Can you point me to a script that will read in ASCII data files (one particle per line, x y z lum), and what pointers for tutorials for the smoke/flame effect on the data that I read in?

Thanks very much for your time,
Matt Wood
Physics & Astronomy Dept
Texas A&M University-Commerce

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Hi Matt!

Not sure if someone else has answered your questions elsewhere, but if not, read on! I’m also a computational astrophysicist and noob Blender user. I just posted about my new library, AstroBlend, in another forum which might at least help you a bit in using Blender for hydro sims. I usually do AMR models, but I got some access to some Gadget data via a collaborator and was able to do about 10^6 particles in Blender with some tricks (see Dr. Brian Kent’s website for more info). These visualize SPH data as little “halos” so you can change the colors and shading of them, but I’m not sure you can do exactly a “fire effect” like you are looking for. I think it might be tricky to do 10^5 particles as actual particles in Blender with flames (as opposed to the dirty tricks Kent and I play with loading particle data in), but it is definitely something fun to look into.

Not sure if that is helpful for what you’re looking for, but maybe someone else with more experience in Blender particles can chime in about exactly how many particles one can support given the cool effects you want to add.