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. Pre-processing 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.