Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization

We describe six visualization methods which take advantage of hardware polygon scan conversion, texture mapping, and compositing, to give interactive viewing of 3D scalar fields, and motion for 3D flows. For volume rendering, these are splatting of an optimized 3D reconstruction filter, and tetrahedral cell projection using a texture map to provide the exponential per pixel necessary for accurate opacity calculation. For flows, these are the above tetrahedral projection method for rendering the flow volume dyed after passing through a dye releasing polygon, splatting of cycled anisotropic textures to provide flow direction and motion visualization, splatting motion blurred particles to indicate flow velocity, and advecting a texture directly to show the flow motion. All these techniques are tailored to take advantage of existing graphics pipelines to produce interactive visualization tools.