Section:
New Results
Visualizing Flows with Animated Arrow Plots
Participants :
Bruno Jobard, Nicolas Ray, Dmitry Sokolov.
Flow fields are often represented as a set of static arrows in
illustration of scientific vulgarization, documentary, meteorology,
etc. This simple and schematic representation lets an observer
intuitively interpret the main properties of a flow: its orientation
and velocity magnitude (Figure 5 ).
We have investigated how to automatically generate dynamic versions of
such representations for unsteady flow fields. As a result, we
designed an algorithm able to smoothly animate arrows along the flow
while controlling their density in the domain over time. Beside
keeping an even distribution of arrows over time, we made significant
efforts to remove disturbing rendering artefacts such as the
apparition of a new arrow, the removing of existing arrows, and the
representation of field where the velocity is null. This work has been
published as a research report, [24] .
Figure
5. Ocean currents visualized with a set of dynamic arrows. The
Close-up shows the arrow trajectories and the morphing of their
glyphs. |