Visualization of dynamic multi-body simulation data

The purpose of this paper is to describe what is needed to create a complete multibody visualization system. The complete visualization process includes everything from data storage to image rendering, and what is needed for a meaningful user-to-data interaction. Normally the simulation output data has a large number of time steps, in the order of 10(3) to 10(6). In order to handle this large amount of data all possible bottlenecks need to be removed. This includes data storage, data processing, system modeling, and image rendering. An object oriented approach is used for the multibody model, its basic simulation data structures, and for the visualization system. This gives well structured models and supports both efficient computation and visualization without additional transformations. Simulation data can be classified into three classes, scalar-data, vector-data, and surface-data. This paper focuses on time-varying vector data. The huge amount of data and time steps require data compression. Vectors are compressed using an algorithm specially designed for time-varying vector data. Selective data access is required during visualization. A block based streaming technique is created to achieve fast selective data access. These visualization techniques are used in a full-scale industrial system and has proven its usefulness.