Segment-based tetrahedral meshing and rendering

• Authors: Ralf Sondershaus;Wolfgang Straßer
• Venue: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australasia and Southeast Asia
• Year: 2006

We present a meshing and rendering framework for large unstructured tetrahedral meshes which is based on a collection of segments that form a multi resolution model. Each segment contains several thousand tetrahedra and covers either a part of the original tetrahedral mesh or a simplified version of the mesh. The mesh can be adapted locally at run time to viewing and classification parameters by replacing segments with other segments. Dependencies between segments are stored in a hierarchical graph and ensure a consistent mesh at any time. So, we extend the concept of multi-triangulations from triangle meshes to tetrahedral meshes and show how hierarchical segments can be constructed easily for huge tetrahedral meshes.The segments are stored in a simple, but efficient compressed format which not only saves disc space but also allows for an easy calculation of the incidency information between segments at decompression time. A visualization system exploits the multi-triangulation to increase the interactivity of direct volume rendering, isosurface extraction and vector field visualization such that large meshes can be explored on standard PCs.