Flow Structure based 3D Streamline Placement

Visualizing vector fields using streamlines or some derived applications is still one of the most popular flow visualization methods in use today. Besides the known trade-off between sufficient coverage in the field and cluttering of streamlines, the typical user question is: Where should I start my streamlines to see all important behavior? In previous work, we define flow structures as an extension of flow topology that permits a, partition of the whole flow tailored to the users needs. Based on the skeletal representation of the topology of flow structures, we propose a 3D streamline placement generating a minimal set of streamlines, that on the one hand exactly illustrates the desired property of the flow and on the other hand takes the topology of the specific flow structure into account. We present a heuristic and a deterministic approach and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.