Pixel-Exact Rendering of Spacetime Finite Element Solutions

  • Authors:
  • Yuan Zhou;Michael Garland;Robert Haber

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  • Venue:
  • VIS '04 Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '04
  • Year:
  • 2004

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Computational simulation of time-varying physical processes is of fundamental importance for many scientific and engineering applications. Most frequently, time-varying simulations are performed over multiple spatial grids at discrete points in time. In this paper, we investigate a new approach to time-varying simulation: spacetime discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods. The result of this simulation method is a simplicial tessellation of spacetime with per-element polynomial solutions for physical quantities such as strain, stress, and velocity. To provide accurate visualizations of the resulting solutions, we have developed a method for per-pixel evaluation of solution data on the GPU.We demonstrate the importance of per-pixel rendering versus simple linear interpolation for producing high quality visualizations. We also show that our system can accommodate reasonably large datasets 驴 spacetime meshes containing up to 20 million tetrahedra are not uncommon in this domain.