Visualizing 2D Flows with Animated Arrow Plots

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for creating animated arrow plots to visualize 2D unsteady flow fields, enhancing interpretability and visual appeal over static representations.

Contribution

It presents a novel algorithm that animates arrows smoothly, manages arrow density, and reduces visual artifacts in dynamic flow visualizations.

Findings

Effective animation of flow fields demonstrated on synthetic data.

Reduced popping artifacts and improved visual quality in animations.

Handles low velocity regions with morphing arrow glyphs.

Abstract

Flow fields are often represented by a set of static arrows to illustrate scientific vulgarization, documentary film, meteorology, etc. This simple schematic representation lets an observer intuitively interpret the main properties of a flow: its orientation and velocity magnitude. We propose to generate dynamic versions of such representations for 2D unsteady flow fields. Our algorithm smoothly animates arrows along the flow while controlling their density in the domain over time. Several strategies have been combined to lower the unavoidable popping artifacts arising when arrows appear and disappear and to achieve visually pleasing animations. Disturbing arrow rotations in low velocity regions are also handled by continuously morphing arrow glyphs to semi-transparent discs. To substantiate our method, we provide results for synthetic and real velocity field datasets.