samgeen/hegelian

3D real-time astrophysics simulation visualisation

HEGELIAN

"Helping Everyone Graph Emitted Light from Interactive Artificial Nebulae"

Making the abstract concrete

3D real-time astrophysics simulation visualisation

Sam Geen ([email protected])

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See LICENSE.md for license info

This is a severely work-in-progress architecture for visualising RAMSES outputs in 3D.

The current entry point for testing is Examples/example.py

Current functionality:

• displays uniform cubes with OpenGL + a shader that can ray-trace through 3 channel texture cubes
• has a rotating camera
• finds the max/min of the image with a shader and displays the log of the image in float precision
• a placeholder shader that shows neutral/ionised gas channels
• a routine that converts RAMSES files into uniform cubes with Pymses

It has some dead/non-functional code that

• billboards particles to screen (slow / possibly broken)

TODO:

• Make a much nicer interface to the code
• Tidy up a lot
• Add emission/extinction tables for nebulae / galaxies
• Merge particle / grid output
• Octree or non-uniform structures (mini-ramses format might help?)
• In-situ snapshot reading / caching
• Reference physical units rather than arbitrary code units
• Optimise heavily
• 3D stereoscopic images / planetarium view matrix output
• More camera types (fly-through)
• Video recording capability
• Cosmology view / synthetic observations / telescope simulations
• Optimise camera input controls (e.g. add flag/dt to keyboard controls rather than relying on refresh rate of keyboard)

BRIEF STYLE GUIDE This is not exhaustive and I probably break these myself, but I guess it's useful to have. If you don't know how to do some of this stuff feel free to ask!

• This is a more or less Object Oriented project (insofar as Python allows/needs OO).
• Most functionality is provided by objects containing other objects
• Variables are camel case
• Objects and methods begin with an upper case letter (MyObject.Method), variables a lower case letter (myVariable)
• Try to avoid inheritance (Python doesn't really need inheritance for abstract types, but if it helps use that)
• Try to use composition rather than inheritance to extend functionality wherever possible
• Stuff like multiple inheritance, inheritance of concrete classes is bad
• All data in classes is private, and all methods that don't need to be public should be private.
• A leading underscore means private (e.g. self._camera, self._DoInternalStuffICanBreakLater)
• Try not to make huge .py files, break them up into separate modules if possible (few objects in 1 module at most)
• If you have any opinions on documentation and unit tests please let me know, otherwise try to comment every few lines