GalaxExplorer

Introduction

GalaxExplorer is a real-time 3D visualization tool aimed originally at visualizing spectroscopic redshift galaxy catalog. It is more a hobby project than an attempt to do a full featured visualization tool (like Paraview). Features

• handle large number of particles (tested up to  64 millions particles on a 4 GB memory laptop);
• support for a number of point representation (points, spheres, tree hierarchical, textured), surface representation, and unstructured mesh representation with triangles (using Delaunay tesselation);
• Lagrangian transport of surfaces, with the surface representation mode.
• multiple skyboxes for orientation dependent background;
• real transparency through front peeling algorithm and GLSL shaders;
• support for tracing the trajectory of particles (currently require a large memory to load all particles and all timesteps, but online loading is planned);
• automatic movie capturing;
• remotely controllable through a D-Bus interface (a Python binding is included in the source package, data can be directly uploaded from python);
• snapshoting of the current state and reloading.

Requirements

• QT4 toolkit
• HealPix, for skybox support
• OpenGL >= v2.1, some functionalities may require a higher version.

Getting GalaxExplorer

GalaxExplorer is not anymore in development at the moment. It is available publicly on this bitbucket repository: https://bitbucket.org/glavaux/galaxexplorer