An efficient, high quality method for rendering irregular, quadratic, volume data

Abstract

We introduce here an extension of the work done by Jones [1] on the direct surface rendering (DSR) algorithm for volume data. The original D.S.R. algorithm operates over linear, voxel based data giving high-resolution ray-traced images of iso-surfaces within a volume. The work presented here extends the rendering algorithm to work with data based on quadric shape functions over a mesh constructed of tetrahedral cells. We demonstrate the method applied to Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations of fluid flow, to render high quality isosurface images of scalar datafields