Interactive Illustrative Line Styles and Line Style Transfer Functions for Flow Visualization

Abstract: We present a flexible illustrative line style model for the visualization of streamline data. Our model partitions view-oriented line strips into parallel bands whose basic visual properties can be controlled independently. We thus extend previous line stylization techniques specifically for visualization purposes by allowing the parametrization of these bands based on the local line data attributes. Moreover, our approach supports emphasis and abstraction by introducing line style transfer functions that map local line attribute values to complete line styles. With a flexible GPU implementation of this line style model we enable the interactive exploration of visual representations of streamlines. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model by applying it to 3D flow field datasets.