Open source tools in technical photorealistic large-scale visualisation

As the computational power available increases at approximately constant speed it has become feasible to simulate increasingly complex and therefore increasingly computationally demanding and large cases. It is therefore more and more important to develop post-processing and visualisation methods for very large simulation cases. Parallel simulations using several CPU cores have already been done two or three decades ago. However, post-processing and visualisation has been done mainly using only serial process i.e. one CPU core. This limits post-processing and visualisation possibilities and makes post-processing and visualisation excessively slow in large cases. In addition, it has been very common in the engineering simulation process that the result figures are not very photorealistic but mainly meant to be a design aid. They can be used in engineering design process but customers are nowadays more accustomed to more realistic figures and therefore they can demand more also in the engineering field. One field where figures have to be photorealistic, is advertisement. Usually these figures are produced in the advertisement agency, but can also be produced by the engineer responsible for the simulation. In this report, the capabilities of open source software are investigated in the field of postprocessing and engineering visualisation. Results show that the Salome-platform - OpenFOAM - ParaView - Blender is a very capable open source tool chain for parallel computational fluid dynamics simulation and post-processing and can produce photorealistic results to be used for example in advertisement material.