Abstract
Illustrating streamlines by computer graphics is a common technique to draw velocity fields in fluid dynamics and electrostatic fields in material science, which both are given as vector data at grid points in the space. However, since too many curvilinear lines usually appear in the images, it is difficult to understand physical meanings of computational results. To overcome this problem, a straightforward but fruitful technique is proposed here. In the present scheme, streamlines are classified according to the minimum value. of magnitude of, for example, the electrostatic field along each streamline. This classification is found useful to obtain intuitive images of stream surfaces by selecting streamlines in order to eliminate redundant information. In this note, the technique is explained along with graphics images to show how helpful to extract important features of the vector data.
