Hardware-Assisted Projected Tetrahedra

We present a flexible and highly efficient hardware‐assisted volume renderer grounded on the original Projected Tetrahedra (PT) algorithm. Unlike recent similar approaches, our method is exclusively based on the rasterization of simple geometric primitives and takes full advantage of graphics hardwa...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computer graphics forum Vol. 29; no. 3; pp. 903 - 912
Main Authors: Maximo, A., Marroquim, R., Farias, R.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2010
Subjects:
Algorithms
C (programming language)
Computer graphics
Hardware
I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation-Viewing algorithms
I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Methodology and Techniques-Graphics data structures and data types
Pipelines
Projection
Renderers
Rendering
Shaders
Studies
Tetrahedrons
ISSN:0167-7055, 1467-8659
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We present a flexible and highly efficient hardware‐assisted volume renderer grounded on the original Projected Tetrahedra (PT) algorithm. Unlike recent similar approaches, our method is exclusively based on the rasterization of simple geometric primitives and takes full advantage of graphics hardware. Both vertex and geometry shaders are used to compute the tetrahedral projection, while the volume ray integral is evaluated in a fragment shader; hence, volume rendering is performed entirely on the GPU within a single pass through the pipeline. We apply a CUDA‐based visibility ordering achieving rendering and sorting performance of over 6 M Tet/s for unstructured datasets. Furthermore, as each tetrahedron is processed independently, we employ a data‐parallel solution which is neither bound by GPU memory size nor does it rely on auxiliary volume information. In addition, iso‐surfaces can be readily extracted during the rendering process, and time‐varying data are handled without extra burden.
Bibliography:ArticleID:CGF1673
istex:E33A29C6A9B43BC0BB15A3AA71B453B6887AD628
ark:/67375/WNG-SBM3ZZMR-3
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 14
ObjectType-Article-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0167-7055
1467-8659
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01673.x