1 research outputs found
A Comparison of Rendering Techniques for Large 3D Line Sets with Transparency
This paper presents a comprehensive study of interactive rendering techniques
for large 3D line sets with transparency. The rendering of transparent lines is
widely used for visualizing trajectories of tracer particles in flow fields.
Transparency is then used to fade out lines deemed unimportant, based on, for
instance, geometric properties or attributes defined along them. Since accurate
blending of transparent lines requires rendering the lines in back-to-front or
front-to-back order, enforcing this order for 3D line sets with tens or even
hundreds of thousands of elements becomes challenging. In this paper, we study
CPU and GPU rendering techniques for large transparent 3D line sets. We compare
accurate and approximate techniques using optimized implementations and a
number of benchmark data sets. We discuss the effects of data size and
transparency on quality, performance and memory consumption. Based on our
study, we propose two improvements to per-pixel fragment lists and multi-layer
alpha blending. The first improves the rendering speed via an improved GPU
sorting operation, and the second improves rendering quality via a
transparency-based bucketing.Comment: 16 pages, 8 pages appendi