I wrote an overview almost eight years ago about IDL’s basic routines to visualize a vector field. Not much has changed since then. This paper by Laidlaw, et al, mentioned at the end of my overview, outlines six common visualization techniques and evaluates them on the speed and accuracy of doing common tasks with them.

I think it would be great to have two of the better performing techniques: OSTR (image-guided streamlines, integral curves) and LIC (line-integral convolution) techniques. Between the two of them, they have the best or nearly the best performance in every category. An example OSTR visualization is shown below:

OSTR example

I have tackled LIC and have code to produce images from vector fields in my library.