Abstract

One method of directly rendering a three-dimensional volume of scalar data is to project each cell in a volume onto the screen. Rasterizing a volume cell is more complex than rasterizing a polygon. A method is presented that approximates tetrahedral volume cells with hardware renderable transparent triangles. This method produces results which are visually similar to more exact methods for scalar volume rendering, but is faster and has smaller memory requirements. The method is best suited for display of smoothlychanging data. CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.3.0 [Computer Graphics]: General; I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling. Additional Key Words and Phrases: Volume rendering, scientific visualization. 1 Introduction Display of three-dimensional scalar volumes has recently become an active area of research. A scalar volume is described by some function f(x; y; z) defined over some region R of three-dimensional space. In many scientific ap...

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