High-quality and interactive animations of 3D time-varying vector fields

In this paper, we present an interactive texture-based method for visualizing three-dimensional unsteady vector fields. The visualization method uses a sparse and global representation of the flow, such that it does not suffer from the same perceptual issues as is the case for visualizing dense representations. The animation is made by injecting a collection of particles evenly distributed throughout the physical domain. These particles are then tracked along their path lines. At each time step, these particles are used as seed points to generate field lines using any vector field such as the velocity field or vorticity field. In this way, the animation shows the advection of particles while each frame in the animation shows the instantaneous vector field. In order to maintain a coherent particle density and to avoid clustering as time passes, we have developed a novel particle advection strategy which produces approximately evenly-spaced field lines at each time step. To improve rendering performance, we decouple the rendering stage from the preceding stages of the visualization method. This allows interactive exploration of multiple fields simultaneously, which sets the stage for a more complete analysis of the flow field. The final display is rendered using texture-based direct volume rendering     

A coherent grid traversal approach to visualizing particle-based simulation data

We present an approach to visualizing particle-based simulation data using interactive ray tracing and describe an algorithmic enhancement that exploits the properties of these data sets to provide highly interactive performance and reduced storage requirements. This algorithm for fast packet-based ray tracing of multilevel grids enables the interactive visualization of large time-varying data sets with millions of particles and incorporates advanced features like soft shadows. We compare the performance of our approach with two recent particle visualization systems: one based on an optimized single ray grid traversal algorithm and the other on programmable graphics hardware. This comparison demonstrates that the new algorithm offers an attractive alternative for interactive particle visualization.     

Mass-spring systems on the GPU

We present and analyze different implementations of mass-spring systems for interactive simulation of deformable surfaces on graphics processing units (GPUs). For the amount of springs we target, numerical time integration of spring displacements needs to be accelerated and the transfer of displaced point positions for rendering must be avoided. To fulfill these requirements, we exploit features of recent graphics accelerators to simulate spring elongation and compression on the GPU, saving displaced point masses in graphics memory, and then sending these positions through the GPU again to render the deformed surface. Two different simulation algorithms implementing scattering and gathering operations on the GPU are compared with respect to performance and numerical accuracy. We discuss GPU specific issues to be considered in simulation techniques showing similar computation and memory access patterns to mass-spring systems.     

Texture-based visualization of unsteady 3D flow by real-time advection and volumetric illumination

This paper presents an interactive technique for the dense texture-based visualization of unsteady 3D flow, taking into account issues of computational efficiency and visual perception. High efficiency is achieved by a 3D graphics processing unit (GPU)-based texture advection mechanism that implements logical 3D grid structures by physical memory in the form of 2D textures. This approach results in fast read and write access to physical memory, independent of GPU architecture. Slice-based direct volume rendering is used for the final display. We investigate two alternative methods for the volumetric illumination of the result of texture advection: First, gradient-based illumination that employs a real-time computation of gradients, and, second, line-based lighting based on illumination in codimension 2. In addition to the Phong model, perception-guided rendering methods are considered, such as cool/warm shading, halo rendering, or color-based depth cueing. The problems of clutter and occlusion are addressed by supporting a volumetric importance function that enhances features of the flow and reduces visual complexity in less interesting regions. GPU implementation aspects, performance measurements, and a discussion of results are included to demonstrate our visualization approach.     

Interactive transparency rendering for large CAD models

Transparency is an important graphics effect that can be used to significantly increase the realism of the rendered scene or to enable more effective visual inspection in engineering visualization. In this paper, we propose achieving interactive transparency rendering of a static scene by sorting the triangles in back-to-front order on CPU and supplying the sorted triangles to the graphics pipeline for rendering on GPU hardware. Our sorting method sorts the triangles in object space and is built upon the Binary Space Partition (BSP) and depth-sort methods with its behavior readily tunable to exploit the strengths of both methods. We propose novel techniques to optimize the BSP construction process with respect to multiple factors including tree construction time, tree size, and expected sorting cost. We also propose an improved depth-sort algorithm that can produce correct depth order without triangle split when no cyclic occlusion exists. We demonstrate that the proposed system results in a penalty factor of 4~6 for various types of parts, among which the largest one has nearly 1.2 million triangles. In addition, the penalty factor may be further improved if sorting in CPU and rendering in GPU are executed in parallel. Two approximation strategies are also studied to test the practicality of our system against large CAD assemblies. Experimental results on an assembly containing over 16 million triangles distributed in about 10,000 transparent parts show that the proposed system still results in a penalty factor of 4~6 while producing few artifacts.     

Equalizer: A Scalable Parallel Rendering Framework

Continuing improvements in CPU and GPU performances as well as increasing multi-core processor and cluster-based parallelism demand for flexible and scalable parallel rendering solutions that can exploit multipipe hardware accelerated graphics. In fact, to achieve interactive visualization, scalable rendering systems are essential to cope with the rapid growth of data sets. However, parallel rendering systems are non-trivial to develop and often only application specific implementations have been proposed. The task of developing a scalable parallel rendering framework is even more difficult if it should be generic to support various types of data and visualization applications, and at the same time work efficiently on a cluster with distributed graphics cards. In this paper we introduce a novel system called Equalizer, a toolkit for scalable parallel rendering based on OpenGL which provides an application programming interface (API) to develop scalable graphics applications for a wide range of systems ranging from large distributed visualization clusters and multi-processor multipipe graphics systems to single-processor single-pipe desktop machines. We describe the system architecture, the basic API, discuss its advantadges over previous approaches, present example configurations and usage scenarios as well as scalability results.     

Compression and rendering of iso-surfaces and point sampled geometry

In this paper we present a streaming compression scheme for gigantic point sets including per-point normals. This scheme extends on our previous Duodecim approach [21] in two different ways. First, we show how to use this approach for the compression and rendering of high-resolution iso-surfaces in volumetric data sets. Second, we use deferred shading of point primitives to considerably improve rendering quality. Iso-surface reconstruction is performed in a hexagonal close packing (HCP) grid, into which the initial data set is resampled. Normals are resampled from the initial domain using volumetric gradients. By incremental encoding, only slightly more than 3 bits per surface point and 5 bits per surface normal are required at high fidelity. The compressed data stream can be decoded in the graphics processing unit (GPU). Decoded point positions are saved in graphics memory, and they are then used on the GPU again to render point primitives. In this way high quality gigantic data sets can directly be rendered from their compressed representation in local GPU memory at interactive frame rates (see Fig. 1).     

Interactive Visualization with Programmable Graphics Hardware

One of the main scientific goals of visualization is the development of algorithms and appropriate data models which facilitate interactive visual analysis and direct manipulation of the increasingly large data sets which result from simulations running on massive parallel computer systems, from measurements employing fast high‐resolution sensors, or from large databases and hierarchical information spaces. This task can only be achieved with the optimization of all stages of the visualization pipeline: filtering, compression, and feature extraction of the raw data sets, adaptive visualization mappings which allow the users to choose between speed and accuracy, and exploiting new graphics hardware features for fast and high‐quality rendering. The recent introduction of advanced programmability in widely available graphics hardware has already led to impressive progress in the area of volume visualization. However, besides the acceleration of the final rendering, flexible graphics hardware is increasingly being used also for the mapping and filtering stages of the visualization pipeline, thus giving rise to new levels of interactivity in visualization applications. The talk will present recent results of applying programmable graphics hardware in various visualization algorithms covering volume data, flow data, terrains, NPR rendering, and distributed and remote applications.     

Atomistic Visualization of Mesoscopic Whole‐Cell Simulations Using Ray‐Casted Instancing

Molecular visualization is an important tool for analysing the results of biochemical simulations. With modern GPU ray casting approaches, it is only possible to render several million of atoms interactively unless advanced acceleration methods are employed. Whole‐cell simulations consist of at least several billion atoms even for simplified cell models. However, many instances of only a few different proteins occur in the intracellular environment, which can be exploited to fit the data into the graphics memory. For each protein species, one model is stored and rendered once per instance. The proposed method exploits recent algorithmic advances for particle rendering and the repetitive nature of intracellular proteins to visualize dynamic results from mesoscopic simulations of cellular transport processes. We present two out‐of‐core optimizations for the interactive visualization of data sets composed of billions of atoms as well as details on the data preparation and the employed rendering techniques. Furthermore, we apply advanced shading methods to improve the image quality including methods to enhance depth and shape perception besides non‐photorealistic rendering methods. We also show that the method can be used to render scenes that are composed of triangulated instances, not only implicit surfaces.     

Fast display of illuminated field lines

A new technique for interactive vector field visualization using large numbers of properly illuminated field lines is presented. Taking into account ambient, diffuse and specular reflection terms, as well as transparency and depth cueing, we employ a realistic shading model which significantly increases the quality and realism of the resulting images. While many graphics workstations offer hardware support for illuminating surface primitives, usually no means for an accurate shading of line primitives are provided. However, we show that proper illumination of lines can be implemented by exploiting the texture mapping capabilities of modern graphics hardware. In this way, high rendering performance with interactive frame rates can be achieved. We apply the technique to render large numbers of integral curves of a vector field. The impression of the resulting images can be further improved by a number of visual enhancements, like color coding or particle animation. We also describe methods for controlling the distribution of field lines in space. These methods enable us to use illuminated field lines for interactive exploration of vector fields     

State‐of‐the‐Art in Compressed GPU‐Based Direct Volume Rendering

Great advancements in commodity graphics hardware have favoured graphics processing unit (GPU)‐based volume rendering as the main adopted solution for interactive exploration of rectilinear scalar volumes on commodity platforms. Nevertheless, long data transfer times and GPU memory size limitations are often the main limiting factors, especially for massive, time‐varying or multi‐volume visualization, as well as for networked visualization on the emerging mobile devices. To address this issue, a variety of level‐of‐detail (LOD) data representations and compression techniques have been introduced. In order to improve capabilities and performance over the entire storage, distribution and rendering pipeline, the encoding/decoding process is typically highly asymmetric, and systems should ideally compress at data production time and decompress on demand at rendering time. Compression and LOD pre‐computation does not have to adhere to real‐time constraints and can be performed off‐line for high‐quality results. In contrast, adaptive real‐time rendering from compressed representations requires fast, transient and spatially independent decompression. In this report, we review the existing compressed GPU volume rendering approaches, covering sampling grid layouts, compact representation models, compression techniques, GPU rendering architectures and fast decoding techniques.     

Visualization of Particle‐based Data with Transparency and Ambient Occlusion

Particle‐based simulation techniques, like the discrete element method or molecular dynamics, are widely used in many research fields. In real‐time explorative visualization it is common to render the resulting data using opaque spherical glyphs with local lighting only. Due to massive overlaps, however, inner structures of the data are often occluded rendering visual analysis impossible. Furthermore, local lighting is not sufficient as several important features like complex shapes, holes, rifts or filaments cannot be perceived well. To address both problems we present a new technique that jointly supports transparency and ambient occlusion in a consistent illumination model. Our approach is based on the emission‐absorption model of volume rendering. We provide analytic solutions to the volume rendering integral for several density distributions within a spherical glyph. Compared to constant transparency our approach preserves the three‐dimensional impression of the glyphs much better. We approximate ambient illumination with a fast hierarchical voxel cone‐tracing approach, which builds on a new real‐time voxelization of the particle data. Our implementation achieves interactive frame rates for millions of static or dynamic particles without any preprocessing. We illustrate the merits of our method on real‐world data sets gaining several new insights.     

Special relativistic visualization by local ray tracing

Special relativistic visualization offers the possibility of experiencing the optical effects of traveling near the speed of light, including apparent geometric distortions as well as Doppler and searchlight effects. Early high-quality computer graphics images of relativistic scenes were created using offline, computationally expensive CPU-side 4D ray tracing. Alternate approaches such as image-based rendering and polygon-distortion methods are able to achieve interactivity, but exhibit inferior visual quality due to sampling artifacts. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid rendering technique based on polygon distortion and local ray tracing that facilitates interactive high-quality visualization of multiple objects moving at relativistic speeds in arbitrary directions. The method starts by calculating tight image-space footprints for the apparent triangles of the 3D scene objects. The final image is generated using a single image-space ray tracing step incorporating Doppler and searchlight effects. Our implementation uses GPU shader programming and hardware texture filtering to achieve high rendering speed.     

GPU Shape Grammars

GPU Shape Grammars provide a solution for interactive procedural generation, tuning and visualization of massive environment elements for both video games and production rendering. Our technique generates detailed models without explicit geometry storage. To this end we reformulate the grammar expansion for generation of detailed models at the tesselation control and geometry shader stages. Using the geometry generation capabilities of modern graphics hardware, our technique generated massive, highly detailed models. GPU Shape Grammars integrate within a scalable framework by introducing automatic generation of levels of detail at reduced cost. We apply our solution for interactive generation and rendering of scenes containing thousands of buildings and trees.     

Autonomous Particles for Interactive Flow Visualization

We present an interactive approach to analyse flow fields using a new type of particle system, which is composed of autonomous particles exploring the flow. While particles provide a very intuitive way to visualize flows, it is a challenge to capture the important features with such systems. Particles tend to cluster in regions of low velocity and regions of interest are often sparsely populated. To overcome these disadvantages, we propose an automatic adaption of the particle density with respect to local importance measures. These measures are user defined and the systems sensitivity to them can be adjusted interactively. Together with the particle history, these measures define a probability for particles to multiply or die, respectively. There is no communication between the particles and no neighbourhood information has to be maintained. Thus, the particles can be handled in parallel and support a real‐time investigation of flow fields. To enhance the visualization, the particles' properties and selected field measures are also used to specify the systems rendering parameters, such as colour and size. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on different simulated vector fields from technical and medical applications.     

Real-time visualization of large volume datasets on standard PC hardware

In medical area, interactive three-dimensional volume visualization of large volume datasets is a challenging task. One of the major challenges in graphics processing unit (GPU)-based volume rendering algorithms is the limited size of texture memory imposed by current GPU architecture. We attempt to overcome this limitation by rendering only visible parts of large CT datasets. In this paper, we present an efficient, high-quality volume rendering algorithm using GPUs for rendering large CT datasets at interactive frame rates on standard PC hardware. We subdivide the volume dataset into uniform sized blocks and take advantage of combinations of early ray termination, empty-space skipping and visibility culling to accelerate the whole rendering process and render visible parts of volume data. We have implemented our volume rendering algorithm for a large volume data of 512 x 304 x 1878 dimensions (visible female), and achieved real-time performance (i.e., 3-4 frames per second) on a Pentium 4 2.4GHz PC equipped with NVIDIA Geforce 6600 graphics card ( 256 MB video memory). This method can be used as a 3D visualization tool of large CT datasets for doctors or radiologists.     

Interactive scientific visualization of fluid flow

Examples of scientific visualization techniques used for the interactive exploration of very large data sets from supercomputer simulations of fluid flow are presented. Interactive rendering of images from simulations of grids of 2 million or more computational zones are required to drive high-end graphics workstations to their limits with 2-D data. The author presents one such image and discusses interactive steering of 2-D flow simulations, a phenomenon now possible with grids of half a million computational zones. He uses a simulation of compressible turbulence on a grid of 134 million computational zones to set the scale for discussing interactive 3-D visualization techniques. A concept for a gigapixel-per-second video wall, or gigawall, which could be built with present technology to meet the demands of interactive visualization of the data sets that will be produced by the next generation of supercomputers, is discussed     

一种基于GPU的粒子系统

粒子系统在当今不定形物体仿真中已经得到广泛的应用,但是普通的粒子系统在实时仿真中,粒子总数最多只能达到10000个左右,其中瓶颈在于粒子数据从主处理器到图形硬件的传输和CPU的并行处理能力。文章研究并实现了一种完全基于图形硬件(GPU)的粒子系统,利用GPU的多通道并行处理功能,提高处理速度,可以很大程度地增加粒子系统实时仿真应用中的粒子数量,从而可以提高虚拟环境的逼真程度。实验证明基于GPU的粒子系统的实时性能远远高于普通粒子系统。     

基于PC硬件的大规模数据场快速可视化方法

科学可视化技术在众多领域具有十分广泛的应用,然而直接体绘制技术却有着计算量大、计算时间长的缺点,在普通的PC机上很难实现对大规模数据的实时交互绘制。目前的三维可视化系统通常需要架构在高端的图形工作站或转用计算机上。随着计算机软硬件技术的发展,普通的PC机图形处理器GPU(Graphic Processing Unit)具有了可编程功能。正是借助GPU的可编程功能及其强大的并行处理能力,研究并实现了一种基于普通PC硬件的体会之方法。最后应用该方法对工业、医学等体数据进行可视化,结果证明该方法可以在普通PC上实现较大规模数据的快速可视化。     

An atmospheric visual analysis and exploration system

Meteorological research involves the analysis of multi-field, multi-scale, and multi-source data sets. In order to better understand these data sets, models and measurements at different resolutions must be analyzed. Unfortunately, traditional atmospheric visualization systems only provide tools to view a limited number of variables and small segments of the data. These tools are often restricted to two-dimensional contour or vector plots or three-dimensional isosurfaces. The meteorologist must mentally synthesize the data from multiple plots to glean the information needed to produce a coherent picture of the weather phenomenon of interest. In order to provide better tools to meteorologists and reduce system limitations, we have designed an integrated atmospheric visual analysis and exploration system for interactive analysis of weather data sets. Our system allows for the integrated visualization of 1D, 2D, and 3D atmospheric data sets in common meteorological grid structures and utilizes a variety of rendering techniques. These tools provide meteorologists with new abilities to analyze their data and answer questions on regions of interest, ranging from physics-based atmospheric rendering to illustrative rendering containing particles and glyphs. In this paper, we will discuss the use and performance of our visual analysis for two important meteorological applications. The first application is warm rain formation in small cumulus clouds. Here, our three-dimensional, interactive visualization of modeled drop trajectories within spatially correlated fields from a cloud simulation has provided researchers with new insight. Our second application is improving and validating severe storm models, specifically the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. This is done through correlative visualization of WRF model and experimental Doppler storm data.