Would you like to make 3D visualisations that are visually more
attractive than what ParaView or VisIt can provide? Do you need an image
for a grant application that needs to look spectacular? Would you like
to create a cool animation of flying through your simulation data? Then
this course may be for you!
The goal of this course is to provide you with hands-on knowledge of
producing great images and animations from 3D (scientific) data. We will
be using the open-source package Blender (http://www.blender.org), which
provides good basic functionality, while also being usable for advanced
usage and general editing of 3D data. It is also a lot of fun to work
with (once you get used to its graphical interface).
Example types of relevant scientific data are 3D cell-based simulations,
3D models from photogrammetry, (isosurfaces of) 3D medical scans,
molecular models and earth sciences data. Note that we don't focus on
information visualization of abstract data, such as graphs (although you
could convert those into a 3D model first and then use them in Blender).
We like to encourage participants to bring along (a sample) of the data
they normally work with and would like to apply the course knowledge to.
