The LLNL High Accuracy Volume Renderer for Unstructured Data: Capabilities, Current Limits, and Potential for ASCI/VIEWS Deployment
Peter L. Williams, Nelson Max · 2001
This report describes a volume rendering system for unstructured data, especially finite element data, that creates images with very high accuracy. The system will currently handle meshes whose cells are either linear or quadratic tetrahedra, or meshes with mixed cell types: tetrahedra, bricks, prisms, and pyramids. The cells may have nonplanar facets. Whenever possible, exact mathematical solutions for the radiance integrals and for interpolation are used. Accurate semitransparent shaded isosurfaces may be embedded in the volume rendering. For very small cells, subpixel accumulation by splatting is used to avoid sampling error. A new exact and efficient visibility ordering algorithm is described. The most accurate images are generated in software, however, more efficient algorithms utilizing graphics hardware may also be selected. The report describes the parallelization of the system for a distributed-shared memory multiprocessor machine, and concludes by discussing the system's limits, desirable future work, and ways to extend the system so as to be compatible with projected ASCI/VIEWS architectures.