A Texture-Based Hardware-Independent Technique for Time-Varying Volume Flow Visualization

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Liu, Zhanping | Moorhead II, Robert J.

Affiliations: ERC/GeoResources Institute, P. O. Box 9627, Mississippi State University, MS 39762-9627, USA

Abstract: Existing texture-based 3D flow visualization techniques, e.g., volume Line Integral Convolution (LIC), are either limited to steady flows or dependent on special-purpose graphics cards. In this paper we present a texture-based hardware-independent technique for time-varying volume flow visualization. It is based on our Accelerated Unsteady Flow LIC (AUFLIC) algorithm (Liu and Moorhead, 2005), which uses a flow-driven seeding strategy and a dynamic seeding controller to reuse pathlines in the value scattering process to achieve fast time-dependent flow visualization with high temporal-spatial coherence. We extend AUFLIC to 3D scenarios for accelerated generation of volume flow textures. To address occlusion, lack of depth cuing, and poor perception of flow directions within a dense volume, we employ magnitude-based transfer functions and cutting planes in volume rendering to clearly show the flow structure and the flow evolution.

Keywords: Texture-based flow visualization, Unsteady 3D flow, LIC, UFLIC, Volume rendering

Journal: Journal of Visualization, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 235-244, 2005