Visualizing 2D Flows with Animated Arrow Plots Bruno Jobard1, Nicolas Ray2 and Dmitry Sokolov3 1 LIUPPA laboratory, University of Pau, France,
[email protected] 2 ALICE Team, INRIA Nancy Grand-Est, France,
[email protected] 3 University of Lorraine, France,
[email protected] Figure 1: Ocean currents visualized with a set of dynamic arrows. (Left) The domain is filled with arrows aligned with the flow. The length is proportional to the velocity magnitude. The arrow density is controlled by a custom map to better capture local turbulences. (Right) Close-up showing the arrow trajectories and the morphing of their glyphs. Abstract morphing arrow glyphs to semi-transparent discs. To sub- stantiate our method, we provide results for synthetic and Flow fields are often represented by a set of static ar- real velocity field datasets. rows to illustrate scientific vulgarization, documentary arXiv:1205.5204v1 [cs.GR] 23 May 2012 film, meteorology, etc. This simple schematic represen- tion lets an observer intuitively interpret the main proper- Introduction ties of a flow: its orientation and velocity magnitude. We propose to generate dynamic versions of such representa- Arrow plots are standard static representations for 2D vec- tions for 2D unsteady flow fields. Our algorithm smoothly tor fields. They are intuitive and thus often used to present animates arrows along the flow while controlling their flows mixed with a contextual background image to non- density in the domain over time. Several strategies have expert public. The goal of this work is to provide a simple been combined to lower the unavoidable popping artifacts algorithm that produces clean animated arrow plots for arising when arrows appear and disappear and to achieve presentation purpose.