Hierarchical and Parallelizable Direct Volume Rendering for Irregular and Multiple Grids

A general volume rendering technique is described that efficiently produces images of excellent quality from data defined over irregular grids having a wide variety of formats. Rendering is done in software, eliminating the need for special graphics hardware, as well as any artifacts associated with graphics hardware. Images of volumes with about one million cells can be produced in one to several minutes on a workstation with a 150 MHz processor. A significant advantage of this method for applications such as computational fluid dynamics is that it can process multiple intersecting grids. Such grids present problems for most current volume rendering techniques. Also, the wide range of cell sizes (by a factor of 10,000 or more), which is typical of such applications, does not present difficulties, as it does for many techniques. A spatial hierarchical organization makes it possible to access data from a restricted region efficiently. The tree has greater depth in regions of greater de...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: VISUALIZATION
• Authors: Jane Wilhelms, Allen Van Gelder, Paul Tarantino, Jonathan Gibbs
• Keywords: Graphics Hardware, Multiple Intersecting Grids, Visualization, VISUALIZATION 1996, Volume Rendering Techniques