The motion map: efficient computation of steady flow animations

The paper presents a new approach for animating 2D steady flow fields. It is based on an original data structure called the motion map. The motion map contains not only a dense representation of the flow field but also all the motion information required to animate the flow. An important feature of this method is that it allows, in a natural way, cyclical variable-speed animations. As far as efficiency is concerned, the advantage of this method is that computing the motion map does not take more time than computing a single still image of the flow and the motion map has to be computed only once. Another advantage is that the memory requirements for a cyclical animation of an arbitrary number of frames amounts to the memory cost of a single still image.