Advanced, Automatic Stream Surface Seeding and Filtering

The placement or seeding of stream surfaces in 3D flow fields faces a number of challenges. These challenges include perception, occlusion, and the appropriate representation of flow characteristics. A variety of streamline seeding approaches exist, little corresponding work is presented for stream surfaces. We present a novel automatic stream surface seeding and filtering algorithm. Our approach is designed to capture the characteristics of the flow utilizing illustrative techniques to alleviate occlusion and provide options for filtering. We define and prioritize a set of seeding curves at the domain boundaries from isolines computed from a derived scalar field. We detail the generation of an initial set of surfaces from the set of seeding curves, and discuss a technique for effective surface termination. We then present an algorithm that automatically seeds new interior surfaces, to represent locations not captured by the boundary seeding, at a user specified separation from the initial surface set. The results demonstrate satisfactory domain coverage and effective visualizations on a variety of simulations.