Hardware-Assisted Point-Based Volume Rendering of Tetrahedral Meshes

Toledo, Rodrigo; Wang, Bin; Lévy, Bruno

doi:10.1109/sibgrapi.2007.20

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 20 publications

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“…In this method, a frame rate of 9 fps and 1 fps have respectively achieved for 256 3 (16.8 mega particles) and 512 3 (134.2 mega particles) using a PC cluster system composed of 7 render nodes and a display node. On the other hand, Anderson et al [16] proposed a point-based technique to render irregular volumes. They represent a tetrahedral cell as point primitives at the center, followed by rendering and compositing of the represented point primitives.…”

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Improvement of particle-based volume rendering for visualizing irregular volume data sets

Sakamoto

Kawamura

Koyamada

et al. 2010

Computers & Graphics

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We present a technique for previewing large-scale irregular volume datasets using an improved particle-based volume rendering (PBVR) technique. Volume rendering of irregular grid volume data is considerably more complicated than that of regular grid data, since the sampling and compositing processes, which must be done in visibility order, are not straightforward. In our original PBVR, rendering involves generating and projecting sub-pixel-size, opaque, and emissive particles without visibility ordering. To make it easier to preview large-scale irregular volume datasets, we improve our original PBVR technique in two respects. The first is that we exploit its scalability to develop a cell-bycell particle generation technique. The second is that we reduce the memory cost of the frame buffer using a pixel-by-pixel superimposing technique. To measure the effectiveness of our proposed method, we apply it to huge irregular volume datasets composed of 71 mega hexahedral cells or 1 giga tetrahedral cells. Keywords volume rendering, large-scale irregular volume datasets, tetrahedral cells, hexahedral cells. 1 INTRODUCTION Many volume rendering methods have been developed over the past two decades. In fact, the development of techniques for irregular volumes remains a challenging area in the visualization community. Irregular volume datasets consist mainly of scalar data defined on collections of irregularly ordered cells whose shapes are not necessarily orthogonal cubic. Data of this type can be found in the results of the finite element method (FEM) technique, which is widely used in computational mechanics. It is also becoming popular in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). High performance computing calculates a huge FEM model, which cannot reside in a single computational node and is distributed to multiple computational nodes. A user must be able to do a fast preview in order to evaluate whether the computation was successful. For previewing a volume dataset, a volume rendering technique is suitable, since it lets the user visualize the whole volume space. However, splatting requires visibility sorting, in which all volume cells need to be processed in advance at each viewing point. Our particle-based volume rendering (PBVR) technique is suitable for previewing a huge irregular volume dataset, since it requires no visibility sorting. The technique represents a given volume dataset as a set of particles that are emissive and opaque, based on a particle model derived from Sabella's density emitter model [1]. Once a volume dataset is converted to a set of particles, the rendering process is efficient, regardless of the visibility order. Scalability in the number of the volume cells is crucial to successful volume rendering of huge irregular volume datasets. We were therefore obliged to modify our original PBVR so that it could process an irregular volume dataset cell-by-cell. In this paper, we describe an improved PBVR that make it easier to preview a huge irregular volume dataset. One improvement is that it generates pa...

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Improvement of particle-based volume rendering for visualizing irregular volume data sets

Sakamoto

Kawamura

Koyamada

et al. 2010

Computers & Graphics

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Level-of-Detail Rendering of Large-Scale Irregular Volume Datasets Using Particles

Takuma¹,

Kawamura²,

Naohisa³

et al. 2010

J. Comput. Sci. Technol.

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This paper describes a level-of-detail rendering technique for large-scale irregular volume datasets. It is well known that the memory bandwidth consumed by visibility sorting becomes the limiting factor when carrying out volume rendering of such datasets. To develop a sorting-free volume rendering technique, we previously proposed a particle-based technique that generates opaque and emissive particles using a density function constant within an irregular volume cell and projects the particles onto an image plane with sub-pixels. When the density function changes significantly in an irregular volume cell, the cell boundary may become prominent, which can cause blocky noise. When the number of the sub-pixels increases, the required frame buffer tends to be large. To solve this problem, this work proposes a new particle-based volume rendering which generates particles using metropolis sampling and renders the particles using the ensemble average. To confirm the effectiveness of this method, we applied our proposed technique to several irregular volume datasets, with the result that the ensemble average outperforms the sub-pixel average in computational complexity and memory usage. In addition, the ensemble average technique allowed us to implement a level of detail in the interactive rendering of a 71-million-cell hexahedral volume dataset and a 26-million-cell quadratic tetrahedral volume dataset.

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