Abstract: The current surface icon method to visualize a 3D symmetric tensor field just displays the direction of certain eigenvector field of the tensor field, but not its magnitude. The paper presents that rendering 3D isolines and setting color on the surface icons can display the magnitude of the eigenvector field, thus the direction and magnitude of the eigenvector field are displayed simultaneously on the surface icons, which improves the surface icon method of 3D symmetric tensor fields and reveals more completely the information of tensor fields on surfaces.

Key words: engineering graphics, visualization, surface icon, isoline, symmetric, tensor field