Visualization Resources
For full documentation, please check the Visualization section in Compute Canada’s technical wiki.
- ParaView full-day workshop slides (121 pages, last updated April 2021)
- VisIt full-day workshop slides (129 pages, last updated May 2017)
- “3D visualization for the humanities” slides (69 pages, last updated June 2019)
Table of Contents: “Highlights from the 2021 SciVis Contest” • “Remote visualization on Compute Canada clusters” • “Scientific visualization on NVIDIA GPUs” • “Workflows with Programmable Filter / Source in ParaView” • “The Topology ToolKit (TTK)” • “Intermediate VMD topics: trajectories, movies, scripting” • “Web-based 3D scientific visualization” • “Scientific graphics with gnuplot” • “Photorealistic rendering with ParaView and OSPRay” • “Batch visualization on Compute Canada clusters” • “Molecular visualization with VMD” • “Using YT for analysis and visualization of volumetric data” • “Working with data objects in YT” • “Scientific visualization with Plotly” • “Novel Visualization Techniques from the 2017 Visualize This Challenge” • “Data Visualization on Compute Canada’s Supercomputers” • “Using ParaViewWeb for 3D Visualization and Data Analysis in a Web Browser” • “Scripting and other advanced topics in VisIt visualization” • “CPU-based rendering with OSPRay” • “3D graphs with NetworkX, VTK, and ParaView” • “Graph visualization with Gephi”
“Highlights from the 2021 SciVis Contest”
Webinar (2021-Nov-10) by Alex Razoumov
The 2021 SciVis Contest organized jointly by IEEE and Compute Canada wrapped up on October 28th, with the official announcement of awards at the IEEE Vis conference. This Contest dataset was a numerical simulation of convection in the Earth’s mantle containing 251 timesteps covering 500 Myr of geological time, data courtesy of the Pysklywec Lab (Russell Pysklywec and Hosein Shahnas) at the University of Toronto. The simulation was conducted using Compute Canada’s Niagara cluster. The Contest challenge was to identify various flow features and visualize them clearly as they evolve in time. We saw many good submissions and a ton of innovative visualization ideas. In this webinar we talked about some of the ideas suggested in the submissions.
Please note that the short clips shared in the webinar were not recorded smoothly by Zoom, so it is best to watch these animations inside the presentations linked from the Contest website.
“Remote visualization on Compute Canada clusters”
Webinar (2021-Sep-29) by Alex Razoumov
“Scientific visualization on NVIDIA GPUs”
Webinar (2021-Apr-28) by Nick Leaf (NVIDIA)
“Workflows with Programmable Filter / Source in ParaView”
Webinar (2021-Jan-20) by Alex Razoumov
“The Topology ToolKit (TTK)”
Webinar (2020-Nov-25) by Alex Razoumov
“Intermediate VMD topics: trajectories, movies, scripting”
Webinar (2020-Oct-28) by Olivier Fisette
- PDF slides
- tar file with data and scripts
“Web-based 3D scientific visualization”
Webinar (2020-Apr-29) by Alex Razoumov
“Scientific graphics with gnuplot”
Webinar (2020-Apr-01) by Dmitri Rozmanov
“Photorealistic rendering with ParaView and OSPRay”
Webinar (2020-Jan-15) by Alex Razoumov
- ZIP file with slides and other materials
“Batch visualization on Compute Canada clusters”
Webinar (2019-Sep-18) by Alex Razoumov
- ZIP file with slides and scripts
“Molecular visualization with VMD”
Webinar (2019-Mar-06) by Dmitri Rozmanov
“Using YT for analysis and visualization of volumetric data” - YT webinar Part 1
Webinar (2018-Nov-21) by Alex Razoumov
In this webinar we take a look at YT, a python package for analyzing multi-resolution volumetric and particle data. Initially written for working with astrophysical simulation data, YT is now widely used across many disciplines dealing with 3D simulation or observational/experimental data.
“Working with data objects in YT” - YT webinar Part 2
Webinar (2019-Jan-23) by Alex Razoumov
In Part 2 we learn how to use YT for data analysis and manipulation, including creating isosurfaces and streamlines, exporting 3D scenes to interactive viewers such as ParaView and MeshLab, and subsetting data in many different ways.
“Scientific visualization with Plotly”
Webinar (2018-Mar-28) by Alex Razoumov
“Novel Visualization Techniques from the 2017 Visualize This Challenge”
Webinar (2018-Jan-31)
In this webinar we review the visualization techniques found in 2017 WestGrid’s Visualize This! contest submissions:
- toy conceptual animation created entirely in ParaView, along with the use of programmable sources,
- using Stream Tracer With Custom Source filter to animate streamlines in a stationary flow,
- using integration time contours to animate the grids of dots moving along streamlines,
- animating many properties simultaneously in a single Animation View timeline,
- colour selection for volumetric and semi-transparent plots to highlight specific regions,
- camera animations,
- using Blender game engine to let a user walk through the ParaView-created scene and toggle the visibility of the various physical components, and
coupling visualization with the SuperCollider server to produce on-the-fly audio from selected Q-criterion.
- PDF slides
“Data Visualization on Compute Canada’s Supercomputers”
Webinar (2017-Oct-03) by Alex Razoumov
- ZIP file with slides and other files
“Using ParaViewWeb for 3D Visualization and Data Analysis in a Web Browser”
Webinar (2017-Mar-29) by Alex Razoumov
ParaViewWeb is a lightweight API for writing HTML5 web applications that utilize a remote ParaView server for running a visualization in a web browser. This talk gave an introduction to ParaViewWeb, shared an overview ofJavaScript Web Visualizer’s main features, and explained how to build simple ParaViewWeb apps from scratch.
- ZIP file with slides and other files
“Scripting and other advanced topics in VisIt visualization”
Webinar (2016-Nov-02) by Alex Razoumov
This webinar looks at the Python interface in VisIt, one of several popular open-source, general-purpose visualization packages. We demonstrate the different ways to launch scripts and use them for a number of rendering tasks including processing time-dependent datasets and creating animations. We also take a look at several other interesting topics in VisIt workflows such as visualizing the terrain in 3D and rendering molecules.
- ZIP file with slides and other files
“CPU-based rendering with OSPRay”
Webinar (2016-Sep-28) by Alex Razoumov
OSPRay, Intel’s scalable open-source library, can provide very fast rendering on systems that don’t have GPUs, making it possible to produce high-fidelity visualizations on the same general CPU nodes you use for running your simulations. In this session, we take a look at OSPRay inside ParaView both on a laptop and on a GPU-less cluster node, discuss benchmarks and compare the resulting images built with and without the OSPRay engine.
“3D graphs with NetworkX, VTK, and ParaView”
Webinar (2016-May-24) by Alex Razoumov
Options for 3D graph visualization and analysis are very limited, confined primarily to short-lived research projects or legacy tools that can still be downloaded but are no longer maintained and updated. The reason for this is the popularity of 2D tools such as Gephi and Cytoscape and the expectation that in 3D complex networks will look messy, with some structures occluding others. On the other hand, in 3D layouts we can encode three independent attributes and visualize some unique connection topologies that will be lost in 2D.
- ZIP file with PDF slides and Python scripts
“Graph visualization with Gephi”
Webinar (2016-Mar-22) by Alex Razoumov