Python/3D Visualization: A new book available for students and scientists

Brian Kent is an associate scientist with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory working on pipeline software for VLA and ALMA, and has interests in galaxy surveys, dynamics, and 3D graphics and visualization.

A new book published by IOP is now available entitled “3D Scientific Visualization with Blender.” This work is written for a broad scientific audience of students and researchers interested in rendering their data in 3D. In Here, the book introduces the reader to the interface, how to build and manipulate 3D objects, animate a scene and render a result, and read data into models through the Python API. A chapter with simple examples concludes the book as a launching point for the reader to begin developing their own visualization and analysis scenes. A number of the examples are relevant to astronomical data analysis. The new book available through Amazon or IOP Publishing also has a companion website. The sample video tutorial below exhibits some of the ideas featured in the book.

In the age of large astronomical dataset, it is exciting to consider new software paradigms that might aid us in 3D visualization. Building upon these tutorials, what kinds of visualization scenarios can we envision?

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