Visualizing 3D Vector Fields Using Streamlines with Dynamic Glyphs

Abstract

In flow visualization, the streamline has always been used to display the vector fields, but only using streamlines cannot reveal the nature of flowing intuitively. The dynamic glyphs technology is an important method to show flowing 3D vector fields. However, existing methods of dynamic glyphs are hard to convey the global patterns and local entities at the same time. In this paper, we present a practical method for dynamic visualization of 3D vector fields which combine dynamic glyphs and streamlines, which are rendered respectively according to the information of 3D vector fields. Our method integrates virtues of these two usual techniques, and provides high performance visualization of flowing 3D vector fields directly. Experiments with practical datasets certify that our method could not only depict the local and the global patterns, but more importantly reveal the dynamic nature of flowing 3D vector data.