Volume Rendering Unstructured Grids with Cellular Graphs

@inproceedings{caumon_2,
 abstract = { We propose a general framework to volume render strongly heterogeneous grids, as used in recent
partial differential equation schemes for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Exploiting the
Morse Theory, our general slicing-based rendering algorithm has a smaller complexity than previous
approaches, and makes an optimal use of the combinatorial information of the grid to propagate from
slice to slice. The rendering method is able to process arbitrary meshes and does not require the
preliminary tetrahedralization of the grid. Using the combinatorial information of the grid makes it
possible to reduce the use of the geometrical information to the minimum, which enables the data
structure to be quickly updated when the scalar field is modified.
In this framework, we introduce a versatile data structure to represent and volume render efficiently
strongly heterogeneous grids. The flexibility of this data structure, based on half-edges,
comes at the expense of memory usage. Therefore, a more efficient data structure specialized for
weakly heterogeneous grids is described. Based on static cell descriptions, Cellular Graphs indeed
allows a lighter representation and a faster visualization thanks to optimized memory accesses },
 author = { Caumon, Guillaume AND Levy, Bruno AND Gilles, Despret AND Paul, Jean-Claude },
 booktitle = { Proc. 22nd Gocad Meeting, Nancy },
 title = { Volume Rendering Unstructured Grids with Cellular Graphs },
 year = { 2002 }
}