This short video tutorial shows the creation of a flow illustration with only a few
mouse clicks. Therefore, the flow around a single triangluar obstacle is illustrated,
using only two vortex templates, as well as two stream line templates. Additionally,
a triangle primitive is used to represent the obstacle.
The single steps in this video are:
- Select a proper time step.
- Select the triangle template and draw the triangle.
- Switch to vorticity visualization.
- Select the stream line template.
- Adjust the amount of integration steps to 2000 with a step width of 0.1.
- Place the two stream line template objects onto the flow field.
- Select the vortex tool.
- Place two vortex template objects onto the flow field.
- Adjust the size and orientation of the two vortices.
- Slightly rotate the two vortices towards each other.
- Adjust the amount of arrows displayed along the two stream lines to 3. (default is 5)
- Turn of flow visualization.
To create a flow illustration, you typically perform the following four steps:
- Open a flow field.
- Select a display method to find the features you are interested in.
- Select a flow template.
- Place the flow template in the work space by simply clicking near or on the
feature you want to illustrate.
Before you can place a template into the workspace and modify it, you need to
of open a vector field you want to illustrate. After navigating to the time step
of your choise, you can seect a template-tool from the
Flow tools gallery
in the ribbon bar, e.g. the stream line tool.
Moving the mouse pointer over the domain of the opened vector field, you can see how
the stream line tool adjusts to the vector field. This allows you to immediately
identify interesting features. To place a template object onto the vector field,
you simply press the left mouse button. The template object then immediately appears
object browser on the left side of the application window.
To select a template object you can either click on it in the object browser or, you
can switch to the
select tool in the
Flow tools gallery and select it by
clicking on the template object in the workspace. A selected template object can always be
identified by a
tracker rectangle, highlighting the template'sbounding box.
Additionally, the ribbon bar displays a new, specialized
context category,
allowing to modify the parameters of the currently selected template object.
- Stream line context category. All parameters of a stream line template, e.g. color, style, integration steps, etc.
can be freely adjusted here.
After adjusting the parameters of your templates, you can save your illustration by either pressing
CTRL + S or, by
selecting one of the
save-options in the application menu. You can save your illustration either as a
*.PNG file,
do directly embedd in into a presentation, for example. Alternatively, you can also save your illustration as a
*.SVG file.
This has the advantage, that you can re-open you illustration with
FlowIllustartor, or any other graphics editing program
that supports
*.SVG files.