Point-based stream surfaces and path surfaces

We introduce a point-based algorithm for computing and rendering stream surfaces and path surfaces of a 3D flow. The points are generated by particle tracing, and an even distribution of those particles on the surfaces is achieved by selective particle removal and creation. Texture-based surface flow visualization is added to show inner flow structure on those surfaces. We demonstrate that our visualization method is designed for steady and unsteady flow alike: both the path surface component and the texture-based flow representation are capable of processing time-dependent data. Finally, we show that our algorithms lend themselves to an efficient GPU implementation that allows the user to interactively visualize and explore stream surfaces and path surfaces, even when seed curves are modified and even for time-dependent vector fields.

[1]  Jarke J. van Wijk.  Flow visualization with surface particles , 1993, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[2]  Robert S. Laramee,et al.  Image space based visualization of unsteady flow on surfaces , 2003, IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003..

[3]  Thomas Ertl,et al.  A Hybrid Physical/Device-Space Approach for Spatio-Temporally Coherent Interactive Texture Advection on Curved Surfaces , 2004, Graphics Interface.

[4]  Thomas Frühauf,et al.  Raycasting vector fields , 1996, VIS '96.

[5]  Charles D. Hansen,et al.  GPUFLIC: Interactive and Accurate Dense Visualization of Unsteady Flows , 2006, EuroVis.

[6]  Tony DeRose,et al.  Surface reconstruction from unorganized points , 1992, SIGGRAPH.

[7]  William H. Press,et al.  Numerical recipes in C , 2002 .

[8]  Robert J. Moorhead,et al.  AUFLIC: An Accelerated Algorithm For Unsteady Flow Line Integral Convolution , 2002, VisSym.

[9]  Jarke J. van Wijk,et al.  Image based flow visualization , 2002, ACM Trans. Graph..

[10]  Marc Levoy,et al.  QSplat: a multiresolution point rendering system for large meshes , 2000, SIGGRAPH.

[11]  Takafumi Saito,et al.  Comprehensible rendering of 3-D shapes , 1990, SIGGRAPH.

[12]  Jeff P. Hultquist,et al.  Constructing stream surfaces in steady 3D vector fields , 1992, Proceedings Visualization '92.

[13]  Marc Alexa,et al.  Point set surfaces , 2001, Proceedings Visualization, 2001. VIS '01..

[14]  Thomas Ertl,et al.  Hardware-accelerated Extraction and Rendering of Point Set Surfaces , 2006, EuroVis.

[15]  Leif Kobbelt,et al.  A survey of point-based techniques in computer graphics , 2004, Comput. Graph..

[16]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  Interactive ray tracing of point-based models , 2005, Proceedings Eurographics/IEEE VGTC Symposium Point-Based Graphics, 2005..

[17]  Robert S. Laramee,et al.  Texture Advection on Stream Surfaces: A Novel Hybrid Visualization Applied to CFD Simulation Results , 2006, EuroVis.

[18]  Jarke J. van Wijk,et al.  Image based flow visualization for curved surfaces , 2003, IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003..

[19]  Gordon Erlebacher,et al.  Overview of Flow Visualization , 2005, The Visualization Handbook.

[20]  Brian Cabral,et al.  Imaging vector fields using line integral convolution , 1993, SIGGRAPH.

[21]  Jarke J. van Wijk.  Implicit Stream Surfaces , 1993, IEEE Visualization.

[22]  Robert S. Laramee,et al.  The State of the Art in Flow Visualization: Dense and Texture‐Based Techniques , 2004, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[23]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  On-the-fly Point Clouds through Histogram Pyramids , 2006 .

[24]  Xavier Tricoche,et al.  Surface techniques for vortex visualization , 2004, VISSYM'04.

[25]  Matthias Zwicker,et al.  Pointshop 3D: an interactive system for point-based surface editing , 2002, SIGGRAPH.

[26]  Gordon Erlebacher,et al.  Lagrangian-Eulerian Advection of Noise and Dye Textures for Unsteady Flow Visualization , 2002, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[27]  David L. Kao,et al.  A New Line Integral Convolution Algorithm for Visualizing Time-Varying Flow Fields , 1998, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[28]  Pheng-Ann Heng,et al.  Principal stream surfaces , 1997, Proceedings. Visualization '97 (Cat. No. 97CB36155).