Vector glyphs for surfaces: A fast and simple glyph placement algorithm for adaptive resolution meshes

Abstract

Visualization of flow on boundary surfaces from computational flow dynamics (CFD) is challeng-ing due to the complex, adaptive resolution nature of the meshes used in the modeling and simula-tion process. This paper presents a fast and sim-ple glyph placement algorithm in order to investi-gate and visualize flow data based on unstructured, adaptive resolution boundary meshes from CFD. The algorithm has several advantages: (1) Glyphs are automatically placed at evenly-spaced intervals. (2) The user can interactively control the spatial res-olution of the glyph placement and their precise lo-cation. (3) The algorithm is fast and supports multi-resolution visualization of the flow at surfaces. The implementation supports multiple representations of the flow–some optimized for speed others for ac-curacy. Furthermore the approach doesn’t rely on any pre-processing of the data or parameterization of the surface and handles large meshes efficiently. The result is a tool that provides engineers with a fast and intuitive overview of their CFD simulation results. 1