A hierarchical and view dependent visualization algorithm for tree based AMR data in 2D or 3D

Abstract

In this paper, a solution to the visualization of huge amount of data provided by solvers using tree based AMR method is proposed. This approach strongly relies on the hierarchical structure of data and view dependent arguments: only the visible cells will be drawn, reducing consequently the amount of rendered data, selecting only the cells that intersect the screen and whose size is bigger than one pixel. After a brief statement of the problem, we recall the main principles of AMR methods.We then proceed to the data analysis which shows notable differences related to the dimension (2 or 3). A natural view dependent decimation algorithm is derived in the 2D case (only visible cells are plotted), while in 3D the treatment is not straightforward. The proposed solution relies then on the use of perspective in order to keep the same guidelines that were used in 2D. We then give a few hints about implementation and perform numerical experiments which confirm the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.We finally discuss this approach and give the sketch for future improvements.