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Zusammenfassung:
GMSimViz is an automation tool that produces an animated 3D visualization of geological
faults, ground motion and other earthquake related data. Typically ground motion
simulations are computed by a High Performance Computing (HPC) facility, and its verification
involves various data visualization methods. A 3D animation of the ground motion
is an excellent media to understand the nature of an earthquake, and to communicate
with the general public. However, its production has been largely left to time-consuming
manual interaction with a 3D visualization software package, such as Paraview as no
existing solution provides a fully-automated workflow.
GMSimViz was created to provide a fully automated workflow to produce a quality 3D
animation directly from the ground motion simulation data. It uses the Generic Mapping
Tools (GMT) (Wessel, Smith, Scharroo, Luis, & Wobbe, 2013) to create individual frames
that are joined by FFmpeg to create a movie file.
GMT is a collection of command line interface (CLI) programs. Creating a fully featured
3D animation with a high frame rate often involves execution of millions of GMT
commands. GMSimViz has a Python wrapper to help automate the rendering process
through scripting. Various visual effects such as tilt and rotation of the view and fading
in/out of different elements are fully automated. The view window and related variables
such as viewing angle, center, level of zoom etc. are determined algorithmically based on
the data extracted from the input files.
GMSimViz extends the 3D support provided by GMT by using GMT datum to projection
coordinate conversion. This allows plotting vertical or near-vertical surfaces in any orientation.
The output animation primarily contains the view of geological faults and ground
motion. Users can optionally add map data for liquefaction and landslide probability as
well as road network status data.
The rendering process is computationally intensive, yet provides an excellent opportunity
to compute in parallel. GMSimViz uses Message Passing Interface (MPI) to utilize a
multi-core computer or High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities.
