One important aspect in scientific visualisation is the visualisation of 3D phenomena, such as volumes, surfaces, or particles in a 3-dimensional space, with an emphasis on photorealistic renderings, since they can help viewers explore and understand various aspects of the phenomena simultaneously. Besides interesting and understandable, 3D photorealistic renderings can provide impactful and memorable images that are a great resource for science communication and dissemination, as they can improve the reach and engagement of complex topics. However, Scientists in general lack the training or the time to create high quality and appealing imagery, while designers do not have a deep understanding of the data itself nor the tools to deal with scientific datasets. On its own, each group can more easily fall into the traps of either detailed but unappealing imagery, or non-rigorous “artist’s rendition” style of visuals generally dismissed by the domain scientists. However, when both scientists and designers work together they can create accurate and appealing images and stories.
Furthermore, from the interaction new approaches appear, like the ones we present here. The debate should discuss the work in data visualisation from a cinematic approach and how such approach has inspired the development of the tools and techniques necessary to incorporate data in our workflows and produce high quality visualisations of data from various fields. Moreover, it will be relevant to present recent work-in-progress to visualise large volumes of data with artistic level of control over the resulting images, a pipeline and a set of tools to import large scientific datasets (mainly from 3D simulations) directly into cinematic software tools (Houdini, Blender, Maya, etc.) where we can control and manipulate the visual style more precisely, and reach higher levels of visual quality than with scientific visualisation tools.