Rendering technique of multi-layered domain boundaries and its application to fluid flow in porous media visualizations

Abstract

Current visualization techniques for computational fluid dynamics applications are sophisticated and work well in simple geometries. For complex geometries such as pore spaces, multiple domain boundaries obstruct the view and make the studying of fluid flow fields difficult. To overcome these deficiencies, we use two-sided materials to render the domain boundaries. Using this technique, it is possible to place the camera inside the domain and have a non-obstructed view of the surrounding flow field without losing spatial reference to the domain boundaries. As a result, a larger part of fluid flow visualization is visible. Two-sided material rendering was successfully applied to display still images with Blender Cycles renderer, in a virtual reality environment, and several implementation techniques were explored for using the Visualization Toolkit.