AstroBlend: An Astrophysical Visualization Package for Blender

Abstract: The rapid growth in scale and complexity of both computational and observational astrophysics over the past decade necessitates efficient and intuitive methods for examining and visualizing large datasets. Here, I present {\it AstroBlend}, an open-source Python library for use within the three dimensional modeling software, {\it Blender}. While {\it Blender} has been a popular open-source software among animators and visual effects artists, in recent years it has also become a tool for visualizing astrophysical datasets. {\it AstroBlend} combines the three dimensional capabilities of {\it Blender} with the analysis tools of the widely used astrophysical toolset, {\it yt}, to afford both computational and observational astrophysicists the ability to simultaneously analyze their data and create informative and appealing visualizations. The introduction of this package includes a description of features, work flow, and various example visualizations. A website - www.astroblend.com - has been developed which includes tutorials, and a gallery of example images and movies, along with links to downloadable data, three dimensional artistic models, and various other resources.