Fast Volume Rendering Using a Spherical Index Method for Shading
Yu Wang, Hong Wang, Lu Huang · Advanced engineering forum · 2011
Volume rendering can be used to exhibit the shape and volumetric properties of 3-D objects. However, it requires a considerable amount of time to process the large volume of data. In this article we present a speed-up method by pre-computing some data of the shading model. We index voxel surface normal by and in spherical coordinate system. Each voxel surface normal is pre-computed and stored in array of values [ ]. Some values of the shading model related to voxel surface normal and light vector are also stored. Each rendering we only need updating these values for shading calculation. We found that our speed-up method can reduce about one fourth of computing time but need less additional memory to store surface normal using this spherical index method.