Memory-Efficient On-the-Fly Voxelization and Rendering of Particle Data

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel GPU-friendly real-time voxelization technique for rendering homogeneous media that is defined by particles, e.g., fluids obtained from particle-based simulations such as Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). Our method computes view-adaptive binary voxelizations with on-the-fly compression of a tiled perspective voxel grid, achieving higher resolutions than previous approaches. It allows for interactive generation of realistic images, enabling advanced rendering techniques such as ray casting-based refraction and reflection, light scattering and absorption, and ambient occlusion. In contrast to previous methods, it does not rely on preprocessing such as expensive, and often coarse, scalar field conversion or mesh generation steps. Our method directly takes unsorted particle data as input. It can be further accelerated by identifying fully populated simulation cells during simulation. The extracted surface can be filtered to achieve smooth surface appearance. Finally, we provide a new scheme for accelerated ray casting inside the voxelization.

Real-Time Rendering of Point Clouds With Photorealistic Effects: A Survey

“…In order to make the results as comparable as possible we have to account for the three major factors affecting the rendering time: the number of points/particles in the scene, the screen resolution, and the number of spp. All methods use 1 spp except [53] and [47], which use 2 spp for particle inter-reflections and the methods' spp counts fairly compatible when assessing performance. We have categorized methods achieving real time (≥ 10FPS) or interactive real time (≥ 1FPS), mutually exclusively, and reported the closest maximum number of points still renderable in real-time or interactive frame rates.…”

“…A full GPU implementation of a view aligned voxelized sphere particle structure showed that interparticle refractions and reflections with up to seven fluid layers was possible at interactive frame rates. A view space aligned voxelized sphere particle method fully implemented on the GPU was published in [53]. With photorealistic interparticle refractions and reflections between up to seven fluid layers, they achieved interactive frame rates.…”

Stochastic Volume Rendering of Multi‐Phase SPH Data

“…Zirr and Dachsbacher perform on‐the‐fly voxelization [ZD18] to interactively render photorealistic particle‐based fluids. Reichl et al .…”

Dynamic Visibility‐Driven Molecular Surfaces

“…Dos Santos Brito et al [dSBVeSTT18] presented a ray tracing method for particle data that achieves several frames per second for millions of particles. Zirr and Dachsbacher [ZD18] proposed an on‐the‐fly voxelization method for particle data as well as an accelerated ray casting approach for rendering that achieves a considerable speedup compared to the method by Fraedrich et al [FAW10]. While these approaches focus on more general particle data, several techniques specifically targeted at molecular visualization have been presented.…”