Using VISUAL3 for three dimensional time domain unstructured electromagnetic visualisation

Summary form only. The visualisation of time domain electromagnetic calculations on unstructured meshes requires both high performance graphics workstations and high performance graphical software. We have made use of the public domain VISUAL3 software from MIT, which consists of a highly optimised environment (both in terms of memory requirements and computational efficiency) for 3D visualisation. Our primary use of VISUAL3 has been as a development tool giving accurate and fast visualisation of results obtained during development of the unstructured EM code. The ability to represent vectors in the 2D and 3D windows provides an simple way to check the polarisation; interactive selection and manipulation of these displays was essential to obtain uncluttered representations. The paper illustrates these capabilities by showing the visualisation of scattering from a 3D object