Just a quick update, the video in this post shows some of the work I have been doing for the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. This video consists of 951 frames, each frame is a 3d volume that has been calculated from the GIMIC data set. The volumes are then rendered out from Drishti with a rainbow colour table.

From there, the 951 images are overlaid with the colour table and text in each corner using ImageMagick. The L value shows the redshift for that frame and the L value is the bounding box length in one direction (all sides of the cube are the same length). This simulation zooms in slowly on the dataset as the video progresses. Each frame takes about 40 minutes to calculate, these are calculated in parallel on the Cognac supercomputer, or the Nereus Cloud platform.

The images are then combined into a movie with ffmpeg using the following command:

ffmpeg -f image2 -i c_hidensity%d.png -sameq -r 25 -s 1024x1024 output_video.avi

Here is the final output as a video:

Also, here is a spherical projection of the OWLS dataset rendered with POVray.