Exploding asteroid simulation: photo realistic rendering of polygonal data.

The image shows a simulation of a 20 Megaton explosion, detonated inside a 20 km long Asteroid. The simulation data was generated on Sandia National Lab's Red Storm Supercomputer. ParaView was used to export polygonal data, which was then textured and rendered using a commercial 3d rendering package. Using ParaView's co-processing capability, data was captured directly from the memory of the running super computer simulation. We then created a set of seamless fragment surfaces extracted from the underlying cells' material volume fractions. ParaView outputs a sequence of models that are converted to LightWave polygonal object, using NuGraf, a model format conversion program. The objects vary in size. Custom software and scripts are used to surface the sequence of objects. The final object sequence is then rendered offline with LightWave 10.0.