Sorting and hardware assisted rendering for volume visualization
Clifford M. Stein, Barry G. Becker, Nelson Max · 1994
RenderingWe present some techniques for volume rendering unstructured data.Colors and opacities are interpolated between vertices using hardware assisted texture mapping.We also present a worst case O(n2) method for sorting n arbitrarily shaped convex polyhedra prior to visualization.It generalizes the Newell, Newell and Sancha sort for polygons to 3-D volume elements.We have developed a new volume rendering approximation which takes advantage of the texture mapping and cornpositing available on modem graphics workstations.This allows tetrahedra to be cornposited by the projected tetrahedra algorithm of Shirley and Tuchman, without artifacts due to linear approximation of the non-linear opacity effects.