Conference article

TetSplat: Real-Time Rendering and Volume Clipping of Large Unstructured Tetrahedral Meshes

Ken Museth
Linköping University, Sweden

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Published in: The Annual SIGRAD Conference. Special Theme - Environmental Visualization

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 13:3, p. 5-5

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Published: 2004-11-24

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ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

Museth will present a novel approach to interactive visualization and exploration of large unstructured tetrahedral meshes. These massive 3D meshes are used in mission-critical CFD and structural mechanics simulations; and typically sample multiple field values on several millions of unstructured grid points. Our method relies on the preprocessing of the tetrahedral mesh to partition it into non-convex boundaries and internal fragments that are subsequently encoded into compressed multi-resolution data representations. These compact hierarchical data structures are then adaptively rendered and probed in real-time on a commodity PC. Our point-based rendering algorithm; which is inspired by QSplat; employs a simple but highly efficient splatting technique that guarantees interactive frame-rates regardless of the size of the input mesh and the available rendering hardware. It furthermore allows for real-time probing of the volumetric data-set through constructive solid geometry operations as well as interactive editing of color transfer functions for an arbitrary number of field values.

Thus; the presented visualization technique allows end-users for the first time to interactively render and explore very large unstructured tetrahedral meshes on relatively inexpensive hardware. Further information on the research group can be found at www.gg.itn.liu.se.

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