Wald Ingo, Friedrich Heiko, Marmitt Gerd, Slusallek Philipp, Seidel Hans-Peter
Max-Planck Institut für Informatik, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 85, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany.
IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2005 Sep-Oct;11(5):562-72. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2005.79.
The visualization of high-quality isosurfaces at interactive rates is an important tool in many simulation and visualization applications. Today, isosurfaces are most often visualized by extracting a polygonal approximation that is then rendered via graphics hardware or by using a special variant of preintegrated volume rendering. However, these approaches have a number of limitations in terms of the quality of the isosurface, lack of performance for complex data sets, or supported shading models. An alternative isosurface rendering method that does not suffer from these limitations is to directly ray trace the isosurface. However, this approach has been much too slow for interactive applications unless massively parallel shared-memory supercomputers have been used. In this paper, we implement interactive isosurface ray tracing on commodity desktop PCs by building on recent advances in real-time ray tracing of polygonal scenes and using those to improve isosurface ray tracing performance as well. The high performance and scalability of our approach will be demonstrated with several practical examples, including the visualization of highly complex isosurface data sets, the interactive rendering of hybrid polygonal/isosurface scenes, including high-quality ray traced shading effects, and even interactive global illumination on isosurfaces.
以交互式速率可视化高质量等值面是许多模拟和可视化应用中的一项重要工具。如今，等值面最常通过提取多边形近似来可视化，然后通过图形硬件进行渲染，或者使用预积分体绘制的一种特殊变体。然而，这些方法在等值面质量、复杂数据集的性能不足或支持的着色模型方面存在许多局限性。一种不受这些限制的替代等值面渲染方法是直接对等值面进行光线追踪。然而，这种方法对于交互式应用来说一直太慢，除非使用大规模并行共享内存超级计算机。在本文中，我们基于多边形场景实时光线追踪的最新进展，在商用台式计算机上实现交互式等值面光线追踪，并利用这些进展来提高等值面光线追踪性能。我们将通过几个实际例子展示我们方法的高性能和可扩展性，包括高度复杂的等值面数据集的可视化、多边形/等值面混合场景的交互式渲染（包括高质量的光线追踪着色效果），甚至等值面上的交互式全局光照。
