splash: An Interactive Visualisation Tool for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Simulations

This paper presents splash, a publicly available interactive visualisation tool for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations. Visualisation of SPH data is more complicated than for grid-based codes because the data are defined on a set of irregular points and therefore requires a mapping procedure to a two dimensional pixel array. This means that, in practise, many authors simply produce particle plots which offer a rather crude representation of the simulation output. Here we describe the techniques and algorithms which are utilised in splash in order to provide the user with a fast, interactive and meaningful visualisation of one, two and three dimensional SPH results.