title: Interactive isosurface ray tracing of time-varying tetrahedral volumes.
abstract: We describe a system for interactively rendering isosurfaces of tetrahedral finite-element scalar fields using coherent ray tracing techniques on the CPU. By employing state-of-the art methods in polygonal ray tracing, namely aggressive packet/frustum traversal of a bounding volume hierarchy, we can accomodate large and time-varying unstructured data. In conjunction with this efficiency structure, we introduce a novel technique for intersecting ray packets with tetrahedral primitives. Ray tracing is flexible, allowing for dynamic changes in isovalue and time step, visualization of multiple isosurfaces, shadows, and depth-peeling transparency effects. The resulting system offers the intuitive simplicity of isosurfacing, guaranteed-correct visual results, and ultimately a scalable, dynamic and consistently interactive solution for visualizing unstructured volumes.
authors.affiliation: SCI Institute, University of Utah, USA. wald@sci.utah.edu
authors.forename: Ingo
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Wald
authors.forename: Heiko
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Friedrich
authors.forename: Aaron
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Knoll
authors.forename: Charles D
authors.initials: CD
authors.lastname: Hansen