Ambient Occlusion and Edge Cueing for Enhancing Real Time Molecular Visualization

  • Authors:
  • Marco Tarini;Paolo Cignoni;Claudio Montani

  • Affiliations:
  • -;IEEE Computer Society;IEEE Computer Society

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

The paper presents a set of combined techniques to enhance the real-time visualization of simple or complex molecules (up to order of $10^6$ atoms) space fill mode. The proposed approach includes an innovative technique for efficient computation and storage of ambient occlusion terms, a small set of GPU accelerated procedural impostors for space-fill and ball-and-stick rendering, and novel edge-cueing techniques. As a result, the user's understanding of the three-dimensional structure under inspection is strongly increased (even for still images), while the rendering still occurs in real time.