01 Jul 2007

Hardware-Assisted Point-Based Volume Rendering of Tetrahedral Meshes

Erik W. Anderson, Steven Callahan, Carlos Scheidegger, John Schreiner, Claudio Silva. SIBGRAPI 2007.

Unstructured volume grids are ubiquitous in scientific computing, and have received substantial interest from the scientific visualization community. In this paper, we take a point-based approach to rendering unstructured grids. In particular, we present a novel method of approximating these irregular elements with point-based primitives amenable to existing hardware acceleration techniques. To improve interactivity to large datasets, we have adapted a level-of-detail strategy. We use a well-known quantitative metric to analyze the image quality achieved by the final rendering.

Paper in PDF format (4.6MB). HAVS is open-source software; get it here.