Acquiring opacities from the WWW

Opacities are the basic ingredients necessary for any model with RADMC-3D. The example models in this package contain example opacities, but for professional usage of RADMC-3D it may be necessary to get specific opacity data from the web. These opacity data are usually in a wide variety of formats. To enable RADMC-3D to read them usually requires a conversion into RADMC-3D-readable form (see Section INPUT (required for dust transfer): dustopac.inp and dustkappa_*.inp or dustkapscatmat_*.inp or dust_optnk_*.inp for dust opacities and Section INPUT: Molecular/atomic data: The molecule_XXX.inp file(s) for gas line opacities).

To make it easier for the user to create RADMC-3D-readable input files from opacity data downloaded from the web, we now feature a new directory opac/ in the RADMC-3D distribution in which, for several of the most common WWW databases, we provide Python routines for the conversion. Please read the README_* files in this directory and its subdirectories for details.

Note also that Carsten Dominik made a very nice and easy-to-use tool to generate dust opacities on the Linux/Mac command line. It is called optool, and can be found on github at https://github.com/cdominik/optool . It can produce RADMC-3D-ready dust opacity files.