Interactive Texture-Based Visualization of Isosurfaces

@inproceedings{CastaniéRM2005,
 abstract = { There are basically two ways of visualizing a 3D scalar field: surface rendering and volume rendering. Surface rendering techniques either paint the scalar field on 2D probes, such as arbitrary slices, or display isosurfaces, i.e. surfaces that link all the points in 3D space where the scalar field has a given isovalue. The latter are very powerful but their extraction requires intensive computations and are not suitable for large data sets. In this case, it is almost impossible to edit the isovalue interactively. Software ray casting techniques compute isosurfaces pixel-by-pixel without extracting polygons. They produce very high quality results but are not interactive. On the contrary, texturebased volume rendering interactively renders the volume with semi-transparent slices displayed in a back-to-front order. Based on the same idea, this paper shows how it is possible to display nonpolygonal isosurfaces interactively with the same quality as ray casting approaches. This technique is based on 3D texture mapping and programmable graphics hardware. Isosurfaces are visualized independently on the resolution of the dataset and only depend on the resolution of the display. Moreover, we present a generic multimodal volume rendering system that blends several volumes in the spirit of the “stencil” paradigm used in 2D painting programs. This system enables the efficient co-visualization of several volumes. In addition, it can interactively display non-polygonal isosurfaces painted with an attribute. Among others, one application is the visualization of a 3D scalar field on isosurfaces of a distance map to a horizon, a fault and/or a set of wells. },
 author = { Castanié, Laurent AND Levy, Bruno AND Bosquet, Fabien },
 booktitle = { 25th gOcad Meeting },
 month = { "june" },
 publisher = { ASGA },
 title = { Interactive Texture-Based Visualization of Isosurfaces },
 year = { 2005 }
}