For an audience unfamiliar with scientific visualization, we introduce the field through a single example that brings several of its core techniques together in one scene, rather than presenting each in isolation as courses typically do.
A fluid simulation dataset with three fields — temperature, pressure, and wind — is visualized simultaneously. Volume rendering shows the spatial distribution of temperature; contour lines show the isovalue structure of pressure on a cross-section; stream tubes trace the wind vector field. The combination in a single scene is the argument: scientific visualization is the practice of choosing and composing representations to make the structure of multi-field data visible.