Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu!corkum
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.visualization
From: corkum@csri.toronto.edu (Brent Thomas Corkum)
Subject: Visualization of vector and tensor fields
Message-ID: <1991Feb14.223920.7660@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Organization: Civil Engineering, University of Toronto
Date: 15 Feb 91 03:39:21 GMT
Lines: 21

What I'm looking for is some input on what sort of algorithms people 
are using for the visualization of vector and tensor (stress) data. 

My data is on a regular 3D grid (Elastic Boundary Element Analysis) and I'm 
currently using marching cubes to visualize the individual scalar components
of the tensor.  What I would like to do is implement a fairly intuitive
visualization technique for looking at the principal stresses AND directions
(eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the tensor matrix).

 Does anyone have any insightful ideas on how to do this? Currently I'm
contimplating drawing 3-D vectors with lengths and/or colors indicating
the magnitude of the stress vectors. I've seen some plots of this sort
of thing though and find it very cluttered and hard to understand, 
especially if there are three principal vectors at a point that you 
wish to plot.

Brent Corkum
Civil Engineering
University of Toronto
corkum@boulder.civ.toronto.edu
Hardware Platform: SGI 4D/25T