Interactive Ray Tracing for Isosurface Rendering
IEEE Visualization 98
Authors
Abstract
We show that it is feasible to perform interactive
isosurfacing of very large rectilinear datasets with brute-force ray
tracing on a conventional (distributed) shared-memory multiprocessor
machine. Rather than generate geometry representing the isosurface
and render with a z-buffer, for each pixel we trace a ray through a
volume and do an analytic isosurface intersection computation.
Although this method has a high intrinsic computational cost, its
simplicity and scalability make it ideal for large datasets on current
high-end systems. Incorporating simple optimizations, such as volume
bricking and a shallow hierarchy, enables interactive rendering
(i.e. 10 frames per second) of the 1GByte full resolution Visible
Woman dataset on an SGI Reality Monster. The graphics capabilities of
the reality monster are used only for display of the final color
image.
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