Interactive visualisation of simulated nonwoven fabrics

Computational simulation is widely used in the industry for the optimisation of production processes. The computational simulation of the production of spunbond nonwoven fabrics is a new and emerging field of research. This thesis covers the development of analysis techniques for several aspects of simulated nonwoven fabrics, i.e. fabrics that are made of randomly oriented fibres. We propose a set of visualisation techniques including colour coding, parallel coordinates, tangent colour mapping, and surface reconstruction for the analysis of the simulation data. Furthermore, we propose a model for realistic rendering of nonwoven fabrics in order to create a virtual preview of the simulated nonwoven fabric. This is a topic that has not been addressed before. The rendering model is based based solely on the output of the simulation and relies on existing techniques for realistic rendering of fibrous materials - covering shading, self-shadowing, depth-sorting, and antialiasing. Both aspects, information visualisation and realistic rendering, are required to run at interactive framerates, thus they are accelerated by exploiting modern programmable graphics hardware. As a result, we have achieved major improvements over the previously used visualisation approaches, offering a unified solution for the interactive visualisation and exploration of simulated nonwoven fabrics. We had to apply our model for realistic rendering of nonwoven fabrics to artificial datasets due to restrictions of existing datasets. The results are promising, although our model for realistic rendering of nonwovens still has to prove itself on future simulation results.