Time

The Time option colors the streamline by the amount of time a massless particle would take to get to each point of the streamline, starting at the location.

Animated Time

The Animated Time option is intended for use with the Sweep animation type of GPU Accelerated Animation (see GPU Accelerated Animation). Using this option, streamlines are colored according to a periodic time variable using special color maps. The resulting animation shows movement along streamlines.

The periodic time variable and other variables computed for the streamline are listed in the Variables workspace in the tree under User Locations and Plots > [name of streamline]. The details view (accessible by right-clicking the variable and selecting Edit, or by double-clicking the variable) shows the variable range.

The initial value of Time Interval is -1 [s], which upon creating the streamline is automatically changed to the maximum value of variable Time on Streamline 1 (for a streamline named Streamline 1). Changing the value of Time Interval changes how quickly the periodic time cycles (from 0 to 1) along streamlines.

You can change the color map to affect how quickly segments of the streamlines appear to fade during an animation. To improve the smoothness of animations, you might want to reduce Limits tab > Step Tolerance. Note that, to maintain the overall length of streamlines, you might then also have to increase Limits tab > Upper Limits > Max Segments.

Unique

The Unique option gives each streamline a different color along its whole length, and can be used to track individual streamlines through a domain.