Progressive volume rendering of unstructured grids on modern GPUs

  • Authors:
  • Steven P. Callahan;Louis Bavoil;Valerio Pascucci;Cláudio T. Silva

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Utah;University of Utah;Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory;University of Utah

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Sketches
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We have developed a new progressive technique that allows real-time volume rendering of large tetrahedral meshes. Our approach incrementally streams portions of the mesh to a hardware-assisted volume renderer and displays approximations that increase in quality until a full-quality rendering is achieved. The results of previous steps are stored as image data and re-used in each subsequent refinement, thus leading to an efficient rendering. Our interactive representation of the dataset is efficient, light-weight, and high quality. The result is a level-of-detail framework for interactive exploration of tetahedral datasets too large to render using conventional approaches.