Photorealistic representations of scientific data can not only provide a more striking visual representation, but can in some cases enhance the scientific comprehension of the images. Photorealism is based on including natural lighting effects, such as transparency and shading, into the image rendering. This is generally achieved using ray-tracing or path-tracing techniques.
Photorealistic images / animations can be viewed by standard hardware of sufficient spatial resolution.
Software
Popular open-source software that can be used to apply photorealistic effects to scientific data are:
