A survey on visualization of vector fields by texture-based methods
Andrea Sanna, Bartolomeo Montrucchio, Paolo Montuschi · 2000
Visualization of vector data produced from application areas such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), environmental sciences, and material engineering is a challenging task. Traditional visualization approaches, such as vector plot, particle tracing, stream surfaces, volume rendering, and so on, often provide a rather coarse spatial resolution. This problem is tackled by texture-based algorithms, which can provide the flow visualization by high resolution output texture. Texturebased methods reveal to be effective, versatile, and suitable for a large spectrum of application. In this paper we review, outlining advantages and drawbacks, the most important texture-based techniques known in the literature for: 2D and 3D, steady and unsteady, regular and curvilinear vector grids. 1 INTRODUCTION Visualization of vector data has always been one of the most attractive challenges in the scientific visualization field; Figure 1 shows the classification of the main methodologies known in t...