Progressive Volume Rendering of Large Unstructured Grids
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We describe a new progressive technique that allows real-time rendering of extremely large tetrahedral meshes. Our approach uses a client-server architecture to incrementally stream portions of the mesh from a server to a client which refines the quality of the approximate rendering until it converges to a full quality rendering. The results of previous steps are re-used in each subsequent refinement, thus leading to an efficient rendering. Our novel approach keeps very little geometry on the client and works by refining a set of rendered images at each step. Our interactive representation of the dataset is efficient, light-weight, and high quality. We present a framework for the exploration of large datasets stored on a remote server with a thin client that is capable of rendering and managing full quality volume visualizations.
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Index Terms:
Volume Rendering, Large Unstructured Grids, Client-Server, Progressive Rendering, Level-of-Detail
Citation:
Steven P. Callahan, Louis Bavoil, Valerio Pascucci, Claudio T. Silva, "Progressive Volume Rendering of Large Unstructured Grids," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 1307-1314, Sept. 2006, doi:10.1109/TVCG.2006.171