| Researchers have long been interested in developing a deeper understanding of the key physical mechanisms in fluid dynamics. Of particular interest are the complex relationships between the multiple scalar and vector quantities used to characterize scientific phenomena within the flow. Efforts to achieve a fundamental understanding of these key physical mechanisms remain limited mainly because of a lack of understanding of the nonlinear interactions that occur among the components of the flow.; The goal through this work is to enable researchers to obtain a succinct, meaningful visual summary of the contents of a dataset that consists of multiple, coincident variables. This is accomplished through providing techniques that allow the creation of an image in which the important features of multiple scalar or vector fields can be understood both independently and in the context of the other fields.; This research offers several new techniques for effectively using color and texture to simultaneously convey information about multiple co-located scalar and vector distributions. Specifically, we introduce: (1) color weaving, an alternative to traditional color compositing for simultaneously representing multiple distributions by allowing colors to be closely interwoven via the assignment of distinct separate hues to individual streamlines; (2) applying natural textures to streamlines to create a richly diverse set of possibilities for the visualization of multiple distributions within a flow; (3) embossing to encode the out-of-plane component of a 3D vector field defined over a 2D domain; (4) visualizing multiple 2D vector fields using strategies involving layers of disparate textures and overlapping streamlines. These methods ultimately enhance the ability to provide insight into the complicated interactions that occur within multi-field flow data. |
