Latest News
16th May 2012: v2.1.0 released.
First stable release with the giza backend. New features are as in 2.0-beta, plus:
- 3D vector field visualisation added (examples here)
- GADGET HDF5 read implemented
- Page sizes can be specified in pixels (better for movies)
- Limits can auto-adapt to device aspect ratio
- More general exact solution from file option
- Tiling works with one colour bar per row
- "splash calc" handles different particle types
- Various minor changes and bug fixes
Get it from the download page.
1/5/12: SPLASH on the cover of A&A!
Shazrene Mohamed's beautiful SPLASH-made images from simulations of Betelgeuse's bow shock made the front cover of Astronomy & Astrophysics
29/08/11: v2.0 beta released.
This is a beta release of SPLASH 2.0. New features are as in 1.15.0, plus:
- New giza backend completely replaces PGPLOT
- Antialiased lines, real fonts, support for eps, pdf and svg drivers
- Fewer build dependencies, needs only standard system libraries (cairo, X11)
- Support for semi-transparent text
- TeX-like escape sequences in text strings (\alpha, ^{}, _{})
- Double-rendering implemented
Initially users will notice relatively few changes from the old PGPLOT backend, except that plots look *a lot* nicer. Indeed for backwards compatibility SPLASH can still be compiled with PGPLOT as the backend using "make BACKEND=pgplot". However, this will become progressively more obsolete as features not supported in PGPLOT are added over time (e.g. double rendering).
Please *let me know* of any problems you encounter using the beta version.
About
SPLASH is a free visualisation tool for exploring output from Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations in one, two and three dimensions, focussed mainly on astrophysical applications. It is written in Fortran 90 and utilises the giza/cairo graphics libraries to do the actual plotting. It is based around a command-line menu structure but utilises the interactive capabilities of giza to manipulate data interactively in the plotting window.
SPLASH is a fully interactive program which means that visualisations can be changed rapidly at the touch of a button (e.g. zooming, rotating, shifting cross section positions etc). Data is read *directly* from the code dump format giving rapid access to results and the visualisation is advanced forwards and backwards through timesteps by single keystrokes.
SPLASH uses the SPH kernel to render plots of not only density but other physical quantities, giving a smooth representation of the data. My goal is to eliminate the publication of crap-looking particle plots from SPH codes!
Features:
- Rendering of particle data using the SPH kernel
- Cross-sections through 2D and 3D data (as both particle plots and rendered images).
- Fast projections through 3D data (ie. column density plots, or integration of other quantities along the line of sight)
- Vector plots of the velocity (and other vector quantities), including vector plots in a cross section slice in 3D.
- Surface rendering of 3D data ("ray-trace through particles")
- Rotation and fly-throughs (animation sequences) of 3D data.
- Automatic stepping through timesteps, making animations simple to produce.
- Interactive mode for detailed examination of timestep data (e.g. zooming, rotating, plotting particle labels, working out the gradient of a line, stepping forwards/backwards through timesteps)
- Multiple plots on page, including option to automatically tile plots if y and x limits are the same.
- Plot limits can be fixed, adaptive or particle tracking. Also simple to change axes to log, invert, square root or absolute of a quantity.
- Exact solutions for common SPH test problems (e.g. hydrodynamic shock tubes, polytropes).
- Calculation of quantities not dumped (e.g. pressure)
- Transformation to different co-ordinate systems (for both co-ordinates and vector components).
- Straightforward production of png. Postscript and PDF images which can then be converted into animations or inserted in LaTeX documents.
- Reads from any ascii data format or direct from a binary file. Data reads of dump files produced by some widely used SPH codes (e.g. the publicly available cosmological SPH code GADGET) are included.
Examples of plots produced with SPLASH can be found in the gallery or by looking at papers with figures produced using splash.
Requirements
SPLASH is written in Fortran 90/95/2003 and comes packaged with the custom-built giza backend graphics library (written in C) which depends only on standard system libraries (cairo and X11). SPLASH can alternatively be compiled using PGPLOT as the backend graphics library.
The free and open source gfortran compiler can be used to compile SPLASH.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Some answers to frequently asked questions (including troubleshooting related to installation problems) are given here.