About

Shwirl is a custom standalone Python program to visualise spectral data cubes with ray-tracing volume rendering. The program has been developed to investigate transfer functions and graphics shaders as enablers for scientific visualisation of astronomical data. Details about transfer functions and shaders developed and implemented in shwirl can be found in a full length article by Vohl, Fluke, Barnes & Hassan (2017).

A transfer function is an arbitrary function that combines volumetric elements (or voxels) to set the colour, intensity, or transparency level of each pixel in the final image. A graphics shader is an algorithmic kernel used to compute several properties of the final image such as colour, depth, and/or transparency. Shaders are particularly suited to computing transfer functions, and are an integral part of the graphics pipeline on Graphics Processing Units.

The code is available at https://github.com/macrocosme/shwirl. The program is built on top of Astropy to handle FITS files and World Coordinate System, Qt (and PyQt) for the user interface, and VisPy, an object-oriented Python visualisation library binding onto OpenGL. We implemented the algorithms in the fragment shader using the GLSL language.

The software has been used on Linux, Mac, and Windows machines, including remote desktop on cloud computing infrastructure.

GPUs

Up to now, we have tested the code on NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X, NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M, and NVIDIA GRID K1. Rendering speed will vary depending on your hardware.

Issues, requests and general inquiries

Please send issues, feature requests and/or general inquiries to Dany Vohl via http://macrocosme.github.io/#contact. You can also simply open a new issue on github directly.

Want to contribute?

As mentioned above, shwirl is not intended to be a finished product yet. If you would like to contribute, GitHub pull requests are welcomed.