Visualizing Unsteady Flows on Surfaces Using Spherical Parameterization

We present a view-independent, GPU-friendly method to visualize unsteady flows defined on surfaces using a global parameterization of the mesh. This is achieved by projecting the surface flow mapped to an intermediate spherical parameterization onto the faces of its bounding box. This transformation allows a consistent texture representation of a surface flow and avoids distracting artifacts typically observed in image-based approaches when changing the view parameters. Our method supports visualization techniques requiring the global view of the flow, and we demonstrate its application to GPUFLIC. Visualizing Unsteady Flows on Surfaces Using Spherical Parameterization Guo-Shi Li, Xavier Tricoche, Charles Hansen