Interactive volume visualization of general polyhedral grids

Philipp Muigg, Markus Hadwiger, Helmut Doleisch, Eduard M. Gröller

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

26 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper presents a novel framework for visualizing volumetric data specified on complex polyhedral grids, without the need to perform any kind of a priori tetrahedralization. These grids are composed of polyhedra that often are non-convex and have an arbitrary number of faces, where the faces can be non-planar with an arbitrary number of vertices. The importance of such grids in state-of-the-art simulation packages is increasing rapidly. We propose a very compact, face-based data structure for representing such meshes for visualization, called two-sided face sequence lists (TSFSL), as well as an algorithm for direct GPU-based ray-casting using this representation. The TSFSL data structure is able to represent the entire mesh topology in a 1D TSFSL data array of face records, which facilitates the use of efficient 1D texture accesses for visualization. In order to scale to large data sizes, we employ a mesh decomposition into bricks that can be handled independently, where each brick is then composed of its own TSFSL array. This bricking enables memory savings and performance improvements for large meshes. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach with real-world application results, by visualizing highly complex polyhedral data from commercial state-of-the-art simulation packages. © 2011 IEEE.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)2115-2124
Number of pages10
JournalIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Volume17
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2011

Bibliographical note

KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Signal Processing
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Software
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Interactive volume visualization of general polyhedral grids'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this