Segmentation and Animation Based Strain Tensor Visualization.

@inproceedings{FavreauGM2014,
 abstract = { The visualization of strain fields in deformed 3D models is very important to analyze results of geomechanical computations or 3D restoration, but raises a number of challenges. Indeed, strain is a 2nd order tensor quantity that describes multi-dimensional variations. So the existing visualization methods for scalar or vector fields are not well-designed to assess all the information held by a tensor.
In this work, we propose to use model segmentation and animation to analyze the subsets of a 3D mesh which have the same style of deformation. The segmentation is based on spatial clustering and comparison of strain tensors.
Then, animation is used to show the contours of some of the regions and animate it by moving it from the deformed to the undeformed state to provide an intuitive sense of the internal deformation within the region. This work is implemented on tetrahedral meshes within the GraphicsFramework plugin of the Gocad Geomodeler, and tested to visualize strain associated to restoration of 3D structural models.
This method fits the visualization of the strain tensor field in geology, but displays only an average deformation on a specific region and not the real value of the tensor in each point. In this way, it allows to have a global understanding of the field and a relative value of the deformation but not an actual quantitative insigth of the field. },
 author = { Favreau, Océane AND Caumon, Guillaume AND Lefebvre, Sylvain },
 booktitle = { Proc. 34th Gocad Meeting, Nancy },
 title = { Segmentation and Animation Based Strain Tensor Visualization. },
 year = { 2014 }
}