Illustration and Photography Inspired Visualization of Flows and Volumes

Abstract

Figure 1: Examples of oriented structural flow visualizations harnessing the effectiveness of illustrative and photographic flow techniques. (a) is an illustrative drawing of temperature advection in a convection dataset. The left half shows a normal volume rendering while the right half shows a contour volume rendering using a da Vinci-inspired color palette. (b) emulates a color-pencil sketch to visualize shear stress in a Y-pipe. (c) shows the bow shock of flow past the X38 spacecraft created from a volumetric Schlieren visualization, while (d) shows the flow and tail fin vortices visualized using a volumetric shadowgraph. Understanding and analyzing complex volumetrically varying data is a difficult problem. Many computational visualization techniques have had only limited success in succinctly portraying the structure of three-dimensional turbulent flow. Motivated by both the extensive history and success of illustration and photographic flow visualization techniques, we have developed a new interactive volume rendering and visualization system for flows and volumes that simulates and enhances traditional illustration, experimental advection, and photographic flow visualization techniques. Our system uses a combination of varying focal and contextual illustrative