Flow with animated Arrows

Author

Tristan Bauer

Screenshot

Abstract

This method offers a visualization for 2D flowfields, which are changing over time. Animated arrow glyphs moving with the flow are used to represent the flow in space as well as in time. This way fluid dynamics can be represented in realtime while showing spatial details not directly linked to the flowdata in the background, like for instance satelite imagery.

The implementation is based on the ShadeX Framework, a framework implemented by myself for orchestrating OpenGl resources like Shaders into a multipass rendering pipeline. The flow data is generated on the GPU in real time, such that the user is able to interact with the flow simulation, and the arrow glyph animations are based on OpenGl's transform feedback mechanism.

Executables and Usage

Download the executables from here: Flow Visualization

Then extract the content of the zip file into a folder. Before starting the Application, make sure that the Visual Studio 2008 redistributable package is installed. Then open the bin folder of the extracted files, and start fluid.exe.

After starting the application, a window like in the screenshot above should appear. On the left the simulation area with the arrow glyphs can be seen. Interact with the fluid by whiping with the mousecursor across the simulation area to influence the simulation. And on the right there is a widget for playing around with the main parameters. To set some other solids, choose an image from the menu File>Load solid map from image. Areas made of Pixels having the rgb value zero form the areas where the fluid can move around freely. The other areas act as 2D solid shapes, which cannot be penetrated by the fluid. For choosing another colormap for the fluid, choose an image from the menu File>Load background image.

Source Code

Download the sourcecode from here: Sourcecode

Documentation

Download the documentation of the sourcecode from here: Documentation

Reference

[Jobard et al.]http://web.univ-pau.fr/~bjobard/Research/Publications/2012_Jobard_Ray_Sokolov__Visualizing_2D_Flows_with_Animated_Arrow_Plots.pdf