In the oil industry, clear and unambiguous visualization of vector fields resulting from numerical simulations of black-oil reservoirs is essential. In this dissertation, we study the use of line integral convolution techniques (LIC) for imaging 3D steady vector fields and apply the results to a GPU-based volume rendering algorithm. Due to the density of information present in volume renderings of LIC images, we study the use of sparse textures as input to the LIC algorithm and apply transfer functions to assign color and opacity to scalar fields in order to encode visual information to voxels and alleviate the occlusion problem. Additionally, we address the problem of encoding flow orientation, inherent to LIC, using an extension of the algorithm – Oriented LIC (OLIC). Finally, we present a method for volume animation in order to enhance the flow orientation. We then compare results obtained with LIC and with OLIC.