Visualization

Visualizations in general serve as a decent means to support human communication and inter-disciplinary discussions. In simulations, they are a mandatory component for an efficient and purposeful analysis, in particular. This is the case, because generic computational methods can rarely exploit or detect the simulated phenomena, automatically. Even if so in rare occasions, a visual representation of the analysis results is desirable and necessary for the analyst. Thus, in general, each simulation tool has manifold possibilities to visualize the simulation results and to support the data exploration process. When using linked tools to simulate the material behavior within manufacturing processes, the exploration process comprises several disciplines and domain experts. Hence, a visualization has to, on the one hand, consider the type of visualization typical for the specific domain as well as, on the other hand, form a contiguous comprehensive representation of the material’s state during each time step of the modeled process. This does not only involve multiple scales, but also different temporal and spatial resolutions as well as different kinds of data. This raises several questions that common visualizations do not address. Within this chapter, we give answers regarding questions like “how to handle such process data in visualization” or “how to use such integrated visualizations”.