Effective texture models for three dimensional flow visualization

Visualizing three dimensional flow with geometry primitives is challenging due to inevitable clutter and occlusion. Our approach to tackling this problem is to utilize semi-transparent geometry as well as animation. Using semi-transparency, however, can make the visualization blurry and vague. We investigate perceptual limits and find specific guidelines on using semi-transparency for three dimensional flow visualization. We base our results on the user study that we conducted. The users were shown multiple semi-transparent overlapping layers of flow and were asked how many different flow directions they were able to discern. We utilized textured lines as geometric primitives; two general texture models were used to control opacity and create animation. We found that the number of high scoring textures is small compared to the total number of textures within our models. To test our findings, we utilized the high scoring textures to create visualizations of a variety of datasets.