Chrono:Render A Graphical Visualization Pipeline for Multibody Dynamics Simulations

This paper describes a web-enabled tool capable of generating high quality videos and images from multibody dynamics simulation results. This tool, called Chrono::Render, uses the Blender modeling software as the front end with Pixars RenderMan used to create high quality images. Blender is a free and open source tool used to create and visualize 3D content and provides a robust plugin framework which Chrono::Render leverages. To produce the final image, the Blender front end passes data to a RenderMan compliant rendering engine. Along with Pixars PhotoRealistic RenderMan (PRMan), several open source options such as Aqsis, JrMan, or Pixie can be used. Preprocessing is performed on the client side, where the front end generates a work order for the RenderMan compliant rendering engine to process. This work order, which contains several scripts that define the visualization parameters, along with the pre-processed simulation data and other user-defined geometry assets is uploaded to a remote server hosted by the Simulation Based Engineering Lab. This server contains more than a thousand CPU cores used for high performance computing applications, which can be used to render many frames of an animation in parallel. Chrono::Render is free and open source software released under a BSD3 license.