High-quality rendering of varying isosurfaces with cubic trivariate C 1-continuous splines

Abstract

Smooth trivariate splines on uniform tetrahedral partitions are well suited for high-quality visualization of isosurfaces from scalar volumetric data. We propose a novel rendering approach based on spline patches with low total degree, for which ray-isosurface intersections are computed using efficient root finding algorithms. Smoothly varying surface normals are directly extracted from the underlying spline representation. Our approach is using a combined CUDA and graphics pipeline and yields two key advantages over previous work. First, we can interactively vary the isovalues since all required processing steps are performed on the GPU. Second, we employ instancing in order to reduce shader complexity and to minimize overall memory usage. In particular, this allows to compute the spline coefficients on-the-fly in real-time on the GPU. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.