Unstructured data as 2d/3d textures

I’m not sure if this is the right board or not but I’ll give it a shot.
I’ve been researching hardware accelerated vis of unsteady data fields(IBFV for example). Most of the techniques involve storing the data field(velocity) in a texture and then accessing the texture in a fragment shader to do the advection step. Most of the papers say their methods are good for CFD data. Well my question is how are they representing unstructured data(velocity fields) in textures? This step isn’t described at all in any of the papers but I assume(which you should never do, I know) that their data is either rectilinear or structured which I can understand. But most CFD data is unstructured, so what am I missing?

Here is one of the papers i’ve been referencing:
wscg.zcu.cz/WSCG2004/Papers_2004_Short/K43.pdf

Thanks in advance for any help. . .
Sorry if this is the wrong board. . .

Super wild guess : they sample the unstructured result mesh to a grid fitting the texture. And as far as CFD is concerned, it is very often structured in regular or hierarchical grids.

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