Texture Hardware Assisted Rendering of Time-Varying Volume Data
Eric B. Lum, Kwan-liu Ma, John Clyne · 2001
In this paper we present a hardware-assisted rendering tech-nique coupled with a compression scheme for the interac-tive visual exploration of time-varying scalar volume data. A palette-based decoding technique and an adaptive bit al-location scheme are developed to fully utilize the texturing capability of a commodity 3-D graphics card. Using a sin-gle PC equipped with a modest amount of memory, a texture capable graphics card, and an inexpensive disk array, we are able to render hundreds of time steps of regularly gridded volume data (up to 45 millions voxels each time step) at in-teractive rates, permitting the visual exploration of large sci-entific data sets in both the temporal and spatial domain.