Development in large-scale geotechnical engineering simulation places tremendous demand for efficient visualization of such simulation data. This study presents a lightweight software tool, i.e. Geotechnical Interactive Visualization (GIV), as a solution to this challenge, which achieves efficient interactive visualization of large-scale simulations data in geotechnical engineering. Visualization data flow and algorithms specifically optimized for common geotechnical engineering applications are implemented in GIV. GIV can visualize geotechnical structure models with time-varying attributes attached to mesh with fixed topology, and also models with time-varying mesh topologies but no attributes attached, the two most common visualization tasks in geotechnical engineering. Challenges for large-scale simulation data visualization, including parallel simulation data redundancy, massive data size, dynamic user interaction, and portability are overcome via specifically designed algorithms for simulation data preprocessing and optimized visualization modules using the powerful 3D rendering and interactive game engine Unity3D. Comparison of GIV with several widely used visualization tools for the visualization of large-scale idealized datasets and realistic geotechnical simulations highlights the visualization efficiency, smooth interactivity, and lightweight features of GIV.

大规模岩土工程仿真的发展提出了对这种仿真数据进行有效可视化的巨大需求。这项研究提出了一种轻量级的软件工具，即岩土工程交互式可视化（GIV），以解决这一挑战，它可以在岩土工程中实现大规模模拟数据的高效交互式可视化。在GIV中实现了针对常见岩土工程应用专门优化的可视化数据流和算法。GIV可以可视化具有随时间变化的属性附加到具有固定拓扑的网格的岩土结构模型，还可以具有随时间变化的网格拓扑但不附加属性的模型，这是岩土工程中最常见的两个可视化任务。大规模仿真数据可视化的挑战，通过使用强大的3D渲染和交互式游戏引擎Unity3D专门设计的用于模拟数据预处理的算法和优化的可视化模块，可以克服包括并行模拟数据冗余，海量数据大小，动态用户交互和可移植性在内的所有问题。将GIV与几种广泛使用的可视化工具进行比较，以可视化大规模理想化数据集和现实的岩土模拟，凸显了GIV的可视化效率，流畅的交互性和轻量级功能。