A hardware-assisted hybrid rendering technique for interactive volume visualization

  • Authors:
  • Brett Wilson;Kwan-Liu Ma;Patrick S. McCormick

  • Affiliations:
  • University of California at Davis;University of California at Davis;Los Alamos National Laboratory

  • Venue:
  • VVS '02 Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE symposium on Volume visualization and graphics
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

The scientific simulation and three-dimensional imaging systems in use today are producing large quantities of data that range from gigabytes to petabytes in size. Direct volume rendering, using hardware-based three-dimensional textures, is a common technique for interactively exploring these data sets. The most serious drawback of this approach is the finite amount of available texture memory. In this paper we introduce a hybrid volume rendering technique based on the use of hardware texture mapping and point-based rendering. This approach allows us to leverage the performance of hardware-based volume rendering and the flexibility of a point-based rendering to generate a more efficient representation that makes possible interactive exploration of large-scale data using a single PC.