Multi-resolution motion textures and applications
Matthew Randall. Wahab · eScholarship@McGill (McGill) · 2006
Vector fields arise from experiments and simulations in many scientific and engineering disciplines. The visualization of this data is important to understanding the inherent, nature of the field-generating process as well as providing an intuitive notion of the system's behavior. This thesis addresses some of the limitations in the flow visualization technique of Langer et al. [19]. One drawback of their method is that it uses a static uniform resolution grid. It cannot add more resolution in highly varying areas of the field without increasing the resolution for the entire grid, which comes at a substantial cost. We extend the method to use an adaptive multiresolution grid. This allows the local grid resolution to be dictated by the motion field, leading to both increased accuracy in the visualization as well as a lower computational overhead. Another limitation is that it is restricted to two dimensional grids. We extend the method to curvilinear surface grids. This allows our technique to address a wider range of problems in computer graphics and scientific visualization. Finally, we illustrate the flexibility of the new method by using our motion textures to perform texture-space bump mapping. Our method is demonstrated on various two dimensional curvilinear surfaces.