A high‐speed integrated renderer for interpreting multiple 3D volume data
Tatsuo Miyazawa, Koji Koyamada · The Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation · 1992
Abstract This paper proposes an integrated rendering algorithm for visualizing 3D volumetric and geometric data, such as surfaces, lines and points, simultaneously with depth information, and other algorithms for improving the performance of the rendering process of the first. The first algorithm extends a volume rendering algorithm based on ray‐tracing so that it can handle both 3D volumetric and geometric data. It processes these data in accordance with their original representation formats to eliminate conversion artefacts such as spurious or missing surfaces, and also gives special treatment to volume segments so as to avoid errors in visibility at the intersections between volume segments and geometric data. The other algorithms employ adaptive termination of ray‐tracing, elimination of rays that do not intersect the volume, and adaptive undersampling over an image plane. These improve the performance by three to seven times over the brute‐force approach. The cost and versatility of the algorithm are evaluated by using data from the results of 3D computational fluid dynamics.