Advanced rendering of line data with ambient occlusion and transparency

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributed

Contributors

Abstract

3D Lines are a widespread rendering primitive for the visualization of data from research fields like fluid dynamics or fiber tractography. Global illumination effects and transparent rendering improve the perception of three-dimensional features and decrease occlusion within the data set, thus enabling better understanding of complex line data. We present an efficient approach for high quality GPU-based rendering of line data with ambient occlusion and transparency effects. Our approach builds on GPU-based raycasting of rounded cones, which are geometric primitives similar to truncated cones, but with spherical endcaps. Object space ambient occlusion is provided by an efficient voxel cone tracing approach. Our core contribution is a new fragment visibility sorting strategy that allows for interactive visualization of line data sets with millions of line segments. We improve performance further by exploiting hierarchical opacity maps.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number9216549
Pages (from-to)614–624
Number of pages11
JournalIEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics
Volume27
Issue number2
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2021
Peer-reviewedNo

External IDs

Scopus 85100348455

Keywords