Efficient visualization of physical and structural properties using texture mapping

Using traditional visualization systems, physical properties like plastic strains on FE surfaces are visualized through color coding of the polygons representing the surface elements. Surface areas with nearly equal physical values within predefined ranges are visualized with iso-contouring and color bands. Usually, the intersection points between the contour edges and the polygons representing the elements have to be calculated and additional polygons with different colors have to be created on both sides of the contour line.
In our pre- and postprocessing application crashViewer the physical values serve as entries into a one dimensional texture. Texture mapping is a well established and widely used technique in computer graphics and in scientific visualization. The color of the object, onto which the texture is applied, is modified or replaced at each pixel by a corresponding color from the texture image. Hardware support for texture mapping is now widely available from high-end graphics workstations of various vendors down to PCs.

Besides the further property mappings, textures can also be used to improve the understanding of the shape of complex structures. In our case, we visualize the grid of FE models by mapping a texture that paints borders onto each element. Mainly, we want to eliminate the rendering cost induced by drawing additional wireframe lines. We employ a 2D texture represented by a white image with a black border.