Patel Mohak, Laidlaw David H
IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2021 Jul;27(7):3264-3276. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2020.2968911. Epub 2021 May 27.
Stress tensor fields play a central role in solid mechanics studies, but their visualization in 3D space remains challenging as the information-dense multi-variate tensor needs to be sampled in 3D space while avoiding clutter. Taking cues from current tensor visualizations, we adapted glyph-based visualization for stress tensors in 3D space. We also developed a testing framework and performed user studies to evaluate the various glyph-based tensor visualizations for objective accuracy measures, and subjective user feedback for each visualization method. To represent the stress tensor, we color encoded the original superquadric glyph, and in the user study, we compared it to superquadric glyphs developed for second-order symmetric tensors. We found that color encoding improved the user accuracy measures, while the users also rated our method the highest. We compared our method of placing stress tensor glyphs on displacement streamlines to the glyph placement on a 3D grid. In the visualization, we modified the glyph to show both the stress tensor and the displacement vector at each sample point. The participants preferred our method of glyph placement on displacement streamlines as it highlighted the underlying continuous structure in the tensor field.
应力张量场在固体力学研究中起着核心作用，但在三维空间中对其进行可视化仍然具有挑战性，因为需要在三维空间中对信息密集的多变量张量进行采样，同时避免杂乱。借鉴当前张量可视化的方法，我们将基于图标的可视化方法应用于三维空间中的应力张量。我们还开发了一个测试框架并进行了用户研究，以评估各种基于图标的张量可视化在客观准确性度量方面的表现，以及每种可视化方法的主观用户反馈。为了表示应力张量，我们对原始超二次图标进行了颜色编码，并且在用户研究中，我们将其与为二阶对称张量开发的超二次图标进行了比较。我们发现颜色编码提高了用户的准确性度量，同时用户也对我们的方法给予了最高评价。我们将在位移流线上放置应力张量图标的方法与在三维网格上放置图标的方法进行了比较。在可视化过程中，我们修改了图标，以在每个采样点同时显示应力张量和位移矢量。参与者更喜欢我们在位移流线上放置图标的方法，因为它突出了张量场中潜在的连续结构。
