What is IFrIT?

IFrIT is a powerful tool that can be used to visualize 3-dimensional data sets. IFrIT is written in C++ and is based on the state-of-the-art Visualization ToolKit (VTK) and, optionally, uses a GUI toolkit Qt. VTK is public domain and Qt is open source for all platforms (including Windows).

IFrIT has its origins (and hence name) in a specialized utility designed to visualize ionization fronts in cosmological numerical simulations. But IFrIT has outgrown its origins and now can visualize general data sets as well.

Philosophy behind IFrIT

IFrIT is similar in its capabilities to the commercially available products like Amira or AVS, but is based on a different philosophy. Most of the commercial products allow you to construct a pipeline of your visualization process. The pipeline model gives you a lot of flexibility, but this flexibility comes at a price of having to construct a pipeline even for simple visualizations. IFrIT, instead, limits your flexibility somewhat by giving you only a fixed set of widget controls, but then you can accomplish very complicated visualizations with IFrIT with only a few mouse clicks.

In order to give you a large choice of possibilities in a manageable way, IFrIT uses the hierarchy of tab widgets. In many respects the hierarchy is similar to the directory hierarchy on a hard disk. It offers an advantage of being able to switch between different widget pages in a few mouse clicks (just like between different directories in a file manager).

Another important feature of IFrIT that distinguishes it from most other visualization tools is that it has highly developed support for displaying particles. Particles are rarely used in industry, but are very common in science.

If you would like to check what IFrIT is capable of, check an overview of main features or take a peek at several examples of numerical simulations made with IFrIT.

Who made IFrIT?

IFrIT is written and maintained by Nick Gnedin.

Where to report bugs