| | This Article | |
| |
| |
| | Share | |
| |
| |
| | Bibliographic References | |
| |
| |
| | Add to: | |
| |
 Digg
 Furl
 Spurl
 Blink
 Simpy
 Google
 Del.icio.us
 Y!MyWeb
| |
| | Search | |
| |
| |
| | |
A Generic and Scalable Pipeline for GPU Tetrahedral Grid Rendering
September-October 2006 (vol. 12 no. 5)
pp. 1345-1352
Recent advances in algorithms and graphics hardware have opened the possibility to render tetrahedral grids at interactive rates on commodity PCs. This paper extends on this work in that it presents a direct volume rendering method for such grids which supports both current and upcoming graphics hardware architectures, large and deformable grids, as well as different rendering options. At the core of our method is the idea to perform the sampling of tetrahedral elements along the view rays entirely in local barycentric coordinates. Then, sampling requires minimum GPU memory and texture access operations, and it maps efficiently onto a feed-forward pipeline of multiple stages performing computation and geometry construction. We propose to spawn rendered elements from one single vertex. This makes the method amenable to upcoming Direct3D 10 graphics hardware which allows to create geometry on the GPU. By only modifying the algorithm slightly it can be used to render per-pixel iso-surfaces and to perform tetrahedral cell projection. As our method neither requires any pre-processing nor an intermediate grid representation it can efficiently deal with dynamic and large 3D meshes.
[1] R. Balaz and S. Glassenberg, DirectX and Windows Vista Presentations. http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/archives/ pdc2005, 2005.
[2] S. Callahan, M. Ikits, J. Comba, and C. Silva, Hardware-assisted visibility sorting for unstructured volume rendering. In IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics Vol. 11, 2005.
[3] P. Cignoni, C. Montani, D. Sarti, and R. Scopigno, On the optimization of projective volume rendering. In EG Workshop, Scientific Visualization in Scientific Computing, 1995.
[4] J. Comba, J. Klosowsky, N. Max, J. Mitchell, C. Silva, and P. Willians, Fast polyhedral cell sorting for interactive rendering of unstructured grids. In Proc. of Eurographics, 1999.
[5] A. Doi and A. Koide, An efficient method of triangulating equi-valued surfaces by using tetrahedral cells. In IEICE Transactions Commun. Elec. Inf. Syst., 1991.
[6] J. Georgii and R. Westermann, A multigrid framework for real-time simulation of deformable volumes. In Workshop On Virtual Reality Interaction and Physical Simulation, 2005.
[7] C. Giertsen, Volume visualization of sparse irregular meshes. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl., 1992.
[8] M. Karasick, D. Lieber, L. Nackman, and V. Rajan, Visualization of three-dimensional delaunay meshes. In Algorithmica, 2003.
[9] P. Kipfer and R. Westermann, GPU construction and transparent rendering of iso-surfaces. In Proceedings Vision, Modeling and Visualization '05, 2005.
[10] T. Klein, S. Stegmaier, and T. Ertl, Hardware-accelerated Reconstruction of Polygonal Isosurface Representations on Unstructured Grids. In Proceedings of Pacific Graphics '04, pages 186–195, 2004.
[11] J. Krüger and R. Westermann, Acceleration techniques for GPU-based volume rendering. In IEEE Visualization, 2003.
[12] V. Pascucci, Isosurface computation made simple: Hardware acceleration, adaptive refinement and tetrahedral stripping. In Proc. of IEEE TCVG Symp. on Visualization, 2004.
[13] T. Purcell, I. Buck, W. Mark, and P. Hanrahan, Ray tracing on programmable graphics hardware. ACM Computer Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH '02), 2002.
[14] F. Reck, C. Dachsbacher, R. Grosso, G. Greiner, and M. Stamminger, Realtime isosurface extraction with graphics hardware. In Eurographics Short Presentations, 2004.
[15] S. Röttger and T. Ertl, Cell projection of convex polyhedra. In Proceedings Eurographics/IEEE TVCG Workshop Volume Graphics '03, 2003.
[16] S. Röttger, M. Kraus, and T. Ertl, Hardware-accelerated volume and isosurface rendering based on cell-projection. In Proceedings of IEEE Visualization '00, pages 109–116, 2000.
[17] P. Shirley and A. Tuchman, A Polygonal Approximation to Direct Scalar Volume Rendering. ACM Computer Graphics, Proc. SIGGRAPH '90, 24 (5): 63–70, 1990.
[18] C. Silva and J. Mitchell, The Lazy Sweep Ray Casting Algorithm for Rendering Irregular Grids. Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 4 (2), June 1997.
[19] C. Silva, J. Mitchell, and A. Kaufman, Fast Rendering of Irregular Grids. In Symp. on Volume Visualization, 1996.
[20] C. Silva, J. Mitchell, and P. Williams, An exact interactive time visibility ordering algorithm for polyhedral cell complexes. In VVS '98: Proceedings of the 1998 IEEE symposium on Volume visualization, 1998.
[21] C. Stein, B. Becker, and N. Max, Sorting and hardware assisted rendering for volume visualization. In ACM Symposium on Volume Visualization '94, pages 83–90, 1994.
[22] M. Weiler and T. Ertl, Hardware-Software-Balanced Resampling for the Interactive Visualization of Unstructured Grids. In Proceedings of IEEE Visualization '01, 2001.
[23] M. Weiler, M. Kraus, and T. Ertl, Hardware-based view-independent cell projection. In VolVis, 2002.
[24] M. Weiler, M. Kraus, M. Merz, and T. Ertl, Hardware-Based Ray Casting for Tetrahedral Meshes. In Procceedings IEEE Visualization, 2003.
[25] M. Weiler, M. Kraus, M. Merz, and T. Ertl, Hardware-Based View-Independent Cell Projection. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 9 (2), 2003.
[26] R. Westermann, The rendering of unstructured grids revisited. In EG/IEEE TCVG Symposium on Visualization (VisSym '01), 2001.
[27] R. Westermann and T. Ertl, The VSBUFFER: Visibility Ordering unstructured Volume Primitives by Polygon Drawing. In IEEE Visualization '97, pages 35–43, 1997.
[28] R. Westermann and T. Ertl, Efficiently using graphics hardware in volume rendering applications. In ACM SIGGRAPH 1998, 1998.
[29] J. Wilhelms, A. Van Gelder, P. Tarantino, and J. Gibbs, Hierarchical and parallelizable direct volume rendering for irregular and multiple grids. In IEEE Visualization '96, 1996.
[30] P. Williams, Visibility Ordering Meshed Polyhedra. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 11 (2): 102–126, 1992.
[31] P. Williams, N. Max, and C. Stein, A high accuracy volume renderer for unstructured data. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 4 (1), 1998.
[32] B. Wylie, K. Moreland, L. Fisk, and P. Crossno, Tetrahedral projection using vertex shaders. In VVS '02: Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE symposium on Volume visualization and graphics, 2002.
[33] R. Yagel, D. Reed, A. Law, P. Shih, and N. Shareef, Hardware assisted volume rendering of unstructured grids by incremental slicing. In VVS '96: Proceedings of the 1996 symposium on Volume visualization, 1996.
Index Terms:
Direct volume rendering, unstructured grids, programmable graphics hardware
Citation:
Joachim Georgii, Rüdiger Westermann, "A Generic and Scalable Pipeline for GPU Tetrahedral Grid Rendering," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 1345-1352, Sept. 2006, doi:10.1109/TVCG.2006.110
