A Low Cost Approach to Animated Flow Visualization Using High Quality Video

Abstract

Animated visualization of three-dimensional data is an important tool to gain understanding of complex phenomena. Animation is illustrating time-dependant data as well as providing perception of three-dimensional spatial distribution of data.

The usefulness of computer graphics for creating animation is often restricted due to lacking hardware capabilities. Necessary hardware often is very expensive and thus difficult to access for many scientists. Existing hardware in the medium price range is restricted to some limited techniques for animated graphics.

Both problems may be overcome, if animation sequences need not to be produced in real-time. Inexpensive hardware may be used to produce video tapes which will be used later to display the animation.

In order to do this, an existing visualization system was extended to produce sequences of images. Several additional software tools had to be used to produce the final animated scenes. A special software as well as some hardware was designed to perform the recording process. These tools allow to record single images one at a time onto a video tape.

An animated visualization of a three-dimensional flow field around a wing of a transport aircraft was produced to examine the capabilities of the system as well as to check the quality of the final result.

The procedure suggested here was found to be rather time consuming but leading to excellent results.