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Real‐Time Ray‐Casting and Advanced Shading of Discrete Isosurfaces
Author(s) -
Hadwiger Markus,
Sigg Christian,
Scharsach Henning,
Bühler Khatja,
Gross Markus
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8659.2005.00855.x
Subject(s) - center (category theory) , computer graphics (images) , computer science , graphics , citation , library science , world wide web , chemistry , crystallography
This paper presents a real-time rendering pipeline for implicit surfaces defined by a regular volumetric grid of samples. We use a ray-casting approach on current graphics hardware to perform a direct rendering of the isosurface. A two-level hierarchical representation of the regular grid is employed to allow object-order and image-order empty space skipping and circumvent memory limitations of graphics hardware. Adaptive sampling and iterative refinement lead to high-quality ray/surface intersections. All shading operations are deferred to image space, making their computational effort independent of the size of the input data. A continuous third-order reconstruction filter allows on-the-fly evaluation of smooth normals and extrinsic curvatures at any point on the surface without interpolating data computed at grid points. With these local shape descriptors, it is possible to perform advanced shading using high-quality lighting and non-photorealistic effects in real-time.