AstroBlend: An astrophysical visualization package for Blender

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.