Strategies for interactive exploration of 3D flow using evenly-spaced illuminated streamlines

ABSTRACT

This paper presents several strategies to interactively explore 3D flow. Based on a fast illuminated streamlines algorithm, standard graphics hardware is sufficient to gain interactive rendering rates. Our approach does not require the user to have any prior knowledge of flow features. After the streamlines are computed in a short preprocessing time, the user can interactively change appearance and density of the streamlines to further explore the flow. Most important flow features like velocity or pressure not only can be mapped to all available streamline appearance properties like streamline width, material, opacity, but also to streamline density. To improve spatial perception of the 3D flow we apply techniques based on animation, depth cueing, and halos along a streamline if it is crossed by another streamline in the foreground. Finally, we make intense use of focus+context methods like magic volumes, region of interest driven streamline placing, and spotlights to solve the occlusion problem.

REFERENCES

• 1: Brian Cabral , Leith Casey Leedom, Imaging vector fields using line integral convolution, Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.263-270, September 1993 [doi>10.1145/166117.166151]
• 2: Roger Crawfis , Nelson Max, Direct volume visualization of three-dimensional vector fields, Proceedings of the 1992 workshop on Volume visualization, p.55-60, October 19-20, 1992, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/147130.147150]
• 3: Roger A. Crawfis , Nelson Max, Texture splats for 3D scalar and vector field visualization, Proceedings of the 4th conference on Visualization '93, October 25-29, 1993, San Jose, California
• 4: H. Doleisch and H. Hauser. Smooth brushing for focus+context visualization of simulation data in 3D. Journal of WSCG, 10(1):147--154, 2002.
• 5: Anton Fuhrmann , Eduard Gröller, Real-time techniques for 3D flow visualization, Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '98, p.305-312, October 18-23, 1998, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, United States
• 6: S. Guthe, S. Gumhold, and W. Strasser. Interactive visualization of volumetric vector fields using texture based particles. Journal of WSCG, 10(3):33--41, 2002.
• 7: Victoria Interrante , Chester Grosch, Strategies for effectively visualizing 3D flow with volume LIC, Proceedings of the 8th conference on Visualization '97, p.421-ff., October 18-24, 1997, Phoenix, Arizona, United States
• 8: B. Jobard and W. Lefer. Creating evenly-spaced streamlines of arbitrary density. In Visualization in Scientific Computing '97. Proceedings of the 8. Eurographics Workshop, pages 43--56, 1997.
• 9: B. Jobard and W. Lefer. Multiresolution flow visualization. In WSCG 2001 Conference Proceedings (Posters), pages 33--37, 2001.
• 10: Nelson Max , Barry Becker , Roger Crawfis, Flow volumes for interactive vector field visualization, Proceedings of the 4th conference on Visualization '93, October 25-29, 1993, San Jose, California
• 11: F. Post, B. Vrolijk, H. Hauser, R. S. Laramee, and H. Doleisch. Feature extraction and visualization of flow fields. In State-of-the-Art Proceedings of EUROGRAPHICS 2002 (EG 2002), pages 69--100, 2002.
• 12: Ramesh Raskar, Hardware support for non-photorealistic rendering, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS workshop on Graphics hardware, p.41-47, August 2001, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/383507.383525]
• 13: C. Rezk-Salama , P. Hastreiter , C. Teitzel , T. Ertl, Interactive exploration of volume line integral convolution based on 3D-texture mapping, Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '99: celebrating ten years, p.233-240, October 1999, San Francisco, California, United States
• 14: M. Sabadello. Enhancing spot noise visualizations of 2d and 3d vector fields. In Central European Seminar on Computer Graphics Proceedings, pages 19--29, 2002.
• 15: Mark Segal , Carl Korobkin , Rolf van Widenfelt , Jim Foran , Paul Haeberli, Fast shadows and lighting effects using texture mapping, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.26 n.2, p.249-252, July 1992
• 16: Greg Turk , David Banks, Image-guided streamline placement, Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.453-460, August 1996 [doi>10.1145/237170.237285]
• 17: Jarke J. van Wijk, Spot noise texture synthesis for data visualization, Proceedings of the 18th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.309-318, July 1991
• 18: Jarke J. van Wijk, Image based flow visualization, Proceedings of the 29th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, July 23-26, 2002, San Antonio, Texas
• 19: Malte Zöckler , Detlev Stalling , Hans-Christian Hege, Interactive visualization of 3D-vector fields using illuminated stream lines, Proceedings of the 7th conference on Visualization '96, p.107-ff., October 28-29, 1996, San Francisco, California, United States

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
3D flow visualization, focus-context visualization, illuminated streamlines, interactive exploration