Material Point Method Dataset Rendering on Workstations

by
Abraham J. Stephens

Advised by
Steve Parker

Particles and other spherical glyphs are used in many types of visual- ization. Graphics hardware may be programmed to render three dimen- sional particle glyphs using low bandwidth two dimensional primitives. This impostor rendering technique produces high quality glyphs with a small amount of geometry but greatly increases the per pixel cost of pro- ducing the image- this leaves the rendering system fragment fill limited. When investigating a particle dataset from a material point method simu- lation, a scientist will examine both individual particles and larger struc- tures composed of hundreds of thousands of particles. We summarize the performance characteristics of this rendering technique and describe an adaption of the prioritized layer projection occlusion culling algorithm for this type of data.