into something prettier:

The visualization data is coming from EwE6, a well-respected ecosystem modeling software.  Blender uses inputs such as biomass, water turbidity and light level to create a realtime visualization that allows the user to ’swim’ around in the ocean, watch the schools of fish interact, and see their population change over time.

To accomplish all this, the project consists of 3 layers:

The server core does all the heavy computation while the visualization layer does all the graphics, AI, as well as user interaction.  To facilitate the communication across these two separate processes, a third layer (called the GameClient) is created, providing the bridge.

Being a Blender artist, my main focus is on the visualization layer: the Blender Game Engine.  In the following few posts, I will outline the process in creating this application, and describe some of the issues we faced.  Please leave a comment if you are interested, it will motivate me to write more :)

Done entirely in Blender game engine, running at a solid 30fps.

Have I been promoting this project to death?  Definitely.  I talked about it in Amsterdam, in Vancouver, online, and pretty much everywhere I get a chance.  But is this cool?  You bet:

View OceanViz in  HD

This video is captured in a rush, I did not even attempt to hide all the debugging cubes or the non-animated species floating around in the scene.  But apart from all that, I am quiet happy with where we are with this project already.  Because what we build is a rather scientific visualization, and not a screensaver, all the fishes are dynamically populated by Python, using a series of XML files for biomass data.  So while it looks quite simple, there is a lot of background coding going on to make it all happen.