Abstract. This paper presents a new evenly-spaced streamlines placement algorithm to visualize 2D steady flows. The main technical contribution of this work is to propose a single method to compute a wide variety of flow field images, ranging from texture-like to hand-drawing styles. Indeed the control of the density of the field is very easy since the user only needs to set the separating distance between adjacent streamlines, which is related to the overall density of the image. We show that our method produces images of a quality at least as good as other methods but that it is computationally less expensive and offers a better control on the rendering process.
In recent years the work on vector field visualization has been concentrated on LIC‐based methods. In this paper we propose an alternative solution for the visualization of unsteady flow fields. Our approach is based on the computation of temporal series of correlated images. While other methods are based on pathlines and try to correlate successive images at the pixel level, our approach consists in correlating instantaneous visualizations of the vector field at the streamline level. For each frame a feed forward algorithm computes a set of evenly‐spaced streamlines as a function of the streamlines generated for the previous frame. This is achieved by establishing a correspondence between streamlines at successive time steps. A cyclical texture is mapped onto every streamline and textures of corresponding streamlines at different time steps are correlated together so that, during the animation, they move along the streamlines, giving the illusion that the flow is moving in the direction defined by the streamline. Our method gives full control on the image density so that we are able to produce smooth animations of arbitrary density, covering the field of representations from sparse, that is classical streamline‐based images, to dense, that is texture‐like images.
Simulators for dynamic systems are now widely used in various application areas and raise the need for effective and accurate flow visualization techniques. Animation allows us to depict direction, orientation, and velocity of a vector field accurately. This paper extends a former proposal for a new approach to produce perfectly cyclic and variable-speed animations for 2D steady vector fields (see [1] and [2]). A complete animation of an arbitrary number of frames is encoded in a single image. The animation can be played using the color table animation technique, which is very effective even on low-end workstations. A cyclic set of textures can be produced as well and then encoded in a common animation format or used for texture mapping on 3D objects. As compared to other approaches, the method presented in this paper produces smoother animations and is more effective, both in memory requirements to store the animation, and in computation time.
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