Automotive stylists use visualization tools to put their concepts in a digital form on the screen in much the same way they would use markers, paper, airbrushes, and so on. Using a visualization package, the designer can air brush design details, even textures, with fully customizable, virtual brushes. Instead, it's for flying through engineering databases and being able to pick up a component for an assembly and then getting the bill of materials for that component or assembly. You're typically looking at shaded polygons. It's not very realistic imaging.
Scientific visualization is the compute-intensive visualization performed to evaluate data.
For example, the medical industry creates 3D volumetric reconstructions from magnetic resonance imaging scans, NASA creates 3D views of earth's topography, and the automotive industry creates color-coded displays to visualize data related to computational fluid dynamics and crash analysis. Design or CAD visualization displays a solids or surface model as realistically as possible. Generally, says Lopez, engineers and designers transfer their CAD model data into an animation and rendering environment. There, they can assign different surface properties, such as opacity and reflectivity, to the surfaces of the model, as well as assign color and texture. Shapes, paint, textures, and graphics from the finalized design can go through evaluation tools to check tolerances, curvatures, and continuities, ensuring machinable surfaces.