corkum@csri.toronto.edu (Brent Thomas Corkum) (02/15/91)
What I'm looking for is some input on what sort of algorithms people are using for the visualization of vector and tensor (stress) data. My data is on a regular 3D grid (Elastic Boundary Element Analysis) and I'm currently using marching cubes to visualize the individual scalar components of the tensor. What I would like to do is implement a fairly intuitive visualization technique for looking at the principal stresses AND directions (eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the tensor matrix). Does anyone have any insightful ideas on how to do this? Currently I'm contimplating drawing 3-D vectors with lengths and/or colors indicating the magnitude of the stress vectors. I've seen some plots of this sort of thing though and find it very cluttered and hard to understand, especially if there are three principal vectors at a point that you wish to plot. Brent Corkum Civil Engineering University of Toronto corkum@boulder.civ.toronto.edu Hardware Platform: SGI 4D/25T
corkum@csri.toronto.edu (Brent Thomas Corkum) (02/16/91)
This is a followup on my previous posting. So far I've got a few replies, all seem to suggest plotting an ellipsoid with axis oriented with the eigen vector directions and lengths equal to the magnitudes. I suppose it could be any geometric shape with three principal directions. Since my system is polygon based I'd be more inclined to use a more simplistic shape. Another suggestion was flow fields or tracers, like those used in CFD visualizations. I'd like to here more from people using tracers on what the best system of color and complexity yields the best visualization. Anyways, if I get enough replys I'll make them available through ftp, so if anyone doesn't want me to post there response let me know. Brent Corkum corkum@boulder.civ.toronto.edu