Image-Based Streamline Generation and Rendering

Seeding streamlines in 3D flow fields without considering their projections in screen space can produce visually cluttered rendering results. Streamlines will overlap or intersect with each other in the output image, which makes it difficult for the user to perceive the underlying flow structure. In this work, we developed a system to control the seeding and generation of streamlines in image space to avoid visual cluttering and allow a more flexible exploration of flow fields. With our image space approach, the density and rendering styles of streamlines can be flexibly controlled based on various criteria to improve visual clarity. It is straightforward to implement the level of detail rendering, depth peeling, and stylized rendering of streamlines to allow for more effective visualization of 3D flow fields. This work is being selected by the IEEE Visualization 2006 conference as the Best Poster award and has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

Credits:
The Plume data was provided by John Clyne at The National Center for Atmospheric Research.