Vector Glyphs for Surfaces: A Fast and Simple Glyph Placement Algorithm for Adaptive Resolution Meshes

Visualization of flow on boundary surfaces from computational flow dynamics (CFD) is challenging due to the complex, adaptive resolution nature of the meshes used in the modeling and simulation process. This paper presents a fast and simple glyph placement algorithm in order to investigate 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 resolution of the glyph placement and their precise location. (3) The algorithm is fast and supports multiresolution visualization of the flow at surfaces. The implementation supports multiple representations of the flow–some optimized for speed others for accuracy. 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.