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

Ken Museth and Santiago Lombeyda (2004) TetSplat: Real-time Rendering and Volume Clipping of Large Unstructured Tetrahedral Meshes. In: IEEE Visualization, 10-15 October 2004, Austin, Texas, USA. [CaltechCACR:2004.221]

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Abstract

We 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 pre-processing 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.

EPrint Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	computer graphics, picture/image generation-display, computational geometry and object modeling, constructive solid geometry, computational geometry adn object modeling, curve, surface, solid, and object representations, graphics data structures and data types
Subjects:	All Records
ID Code:	117
Deposited By:	Sarah M. Emery
Deposited On:	10 February 2006
Record Number:	CaltechCACR:2004.221
Official Persistent URL:	http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechCACR:2004.221
Usage Policy:	You are granted permission for individual, educational, research and non-commercial reproduction, distribution, display and performance of this work in any format.

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