Interactive High-Quality Volume Rendering with Flexible Consumer Graphics Hardware

Abstract

Recently, the classic rendering pipeline in 3D graphics hardware has become flexible by means of programmable geometry engines and rasterization units. This development is primarily driven by the mass market of computer games and entertainment software, whose demand for new special effects and more realistic 3D environments induced a reconsideration of the once static rendering pipeline. Besides the impact on visual scene complexity in computer games, these advances in flexibility provide an enormous potential for new volume rendering algorithms. Thereby, they make yet unseen quality as well as improved performance for scientific visualization possible and allow to visualize hidden features contained within volumetric data. The goal of this report is to deliver insight into the new possibilities that programmable state-of-the-art graphics hardware offers to the field of interactive, high-quality volume rendering. We cover different slicing approaches for texture-based volume rendering, non-polygonal iso-surfaces, dot-product shading, environment-map shading, shadows, pre- and post-classification, multi-dimensional classification, high-quality filtering, pre-integrated classification and pre-integrated volume rendering, large volume visualization and volumetric effects.