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Stream Surface Parametrization by Flow‐Orthogonal Front Lines
Author(s) -
Schulze Maik,
Germer Tobias,
Rössl Christian,
Theisel Holger
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8659.2012.03177.x
Subject(s) - computer science , surface (topology) , flow (mathematics) , parametrization (atmospheric modeling) , geometry , visualization , algorithm , perpendicular , current (fluid) , topology (electrical circuits) , mathematics , geology , physics , artificial intelligence , optics , combinatorics , radiative transfer , oceanography
The generation of discrete stream surfaces is an important and challenging task in scientific visualization, which can be considered a particular instance of geometric modeling. The quality of numerically integrated stream surfaces depends on a number of parameters that can be controlled locally , such as time step or distance of adjacent vertices on the front line. In addition there is a parameter that cannot be controlled locally: stream surface meshes tend to show high quality, well‐shaped elements only if the current front line is “ globally ” approximately perpendicular to the flow direction. We analyze the impact of this geometric property and present a novel solution – a stream surface integrator that forces the front line to be perpendicular to the flow and that generates quad‐dominant meshes with well‐shaped and well‐aligned elements. It is based on the integration of a scaled version of the flow field, and requires repeated minimization of an error functional along the current front line. We show that this leads to computing the 1‐dimensional kernel of a bidiagonal matrix: a linear problem that can be solved efficiently. We compare our method with existing stream surface integrators and apply it to a number of synthetic and real world data sets.