Advecting procedural textures for 2D flow animation

Abstract

The paper proposes the use of specially generated 3D procedural textures for visualizing steady state 2D flow fields. We use the flow field to advect and animate the texture over time. However, using standard texture advection techniques and arbitrary textures will introduce some undesirable effects such as: (a) expanding texture from a critical source point, (b) streaking pattern from the boundary of the flow field, (c) crowding of advected textures near an attracting spiral or sink, and (d) absent or lack of textures in some regions of the flow. The paper proposes a number of strategies to solve these problems. We demonstrate how the technique works using both synthetic data and computational fluid dynamics data.