Using interactive particle-based rendering to visualize a large-scale time-varying unstructured volume with mixed cell types

Abstract

The primary challenge in the visualization of a large-scale unstructured volume data with mixed cell types is to dissolve a bottleneck caused by visibility sorting of unstructured cells. In this paper, we implement an interactive particle-based rendering method to solve this complex visualization problem. This technique uses opaque particles as the proxy geometry of the mixed unstructured cells so that the visibility sorting process is not needed. This characteristic makes the rendering of mixed-cell unstructured volume efficient. We also construct a resizing function to adjust the particle radius depending on the assigned transfer function so that the transfer function can be adjusted in real time. Furthermore, we develop a time-varying level-of-detail (LOD) rendering to efficiently handle the large-scale time-varying data. This LOD rendering can provide high-speed rendering for animation rendering and high-quality rendering when the animation is stopped at any time step of interest. These features facilitate the detailed analysis of the temporal features of the data.