Depicting Time Evolving Flow with Illustrative Visualization Techniques

Visualization has become an indispensable tool for scientists to extract knowledge from large amounts of data and convey that knowledge to others. Visualization may be exploratory or illustrative. Exploratory visualization generally provides multiple views of the data at different levels of abstraction and should be highly interactive, whereas illustrative visualization is often made offline at high quality with sufficient knowledge about the data and features of interest. Techniques used by professional illustrators may be borrowed to enhance the clarity and aesthetics of the visualization. This paper presents a set of visualization techniques for presenting the evolution of 3D flow. While the spatial features of the data is rendered in 3D space, the temporal behaviors of the flow are depicted using image-based methods. We demonstrate visualization results generated using three data sets obtained from simulations.