Fast Polyhedral Cell Sorting for Interactive Rendering of Unstructured Grids

Direct volume rendering based on projective methods works by projecting, in visibility order, the polyhedral cells of a mesh onto the image plane, and incrementally compositing the cell's color and opacity into the final image. Crucial to this method is the computation of a visibility ordering of the cells. If the mesh is "well-behaved" (acyclic and convex), then the MPVO method of Williams provides a very fast sorting algorithm; however, this method only computes an approximate ordering in general datasets, resulting in visual artifacts when rendered. A recent method of Silva et al. removed the assumption that the mesh is convex, by means of a sweep algorithm used in conjunction with the MPVO method; their algorithm is substantially faster than previous exact methods for general meshes. In this paper we propose a new technique, which we call BSP-XMPVO, which is based on a fast and simple way of using binary space partitions on the boundary elements of the mesh to augme...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1999
• Where: CGF
• Authors: João Comba, James T. Klosowski, Nelson L. Max, Joseph S. B. Mitchell, Cláudio T. Silva, Peter L. Williams
• Keywords: CGF 1999, Mesh, MPVO Method, Visibility