View-dependent level of detail for real-time rendering of large isosurfaces

Abstract

Isosurface extraction is a widely used method for interactive visualization of volumetric scalar data sets in many scientific, engineering and entertainment applications. When visualizing large isosurfaces, interactive frame rates are enabled by view-dependent level-of-detail rendering techniques. However, these techniques usually require lengthy pre-processing and thus are unsuitable for visualizing procedurally-generated or dynamic data. In this paper, we present an approach for real-time rendering of isosurfaces with the view-dependent level of detail. It is based on a pointerless octree for low-overhead hierarchy management and a modified Dual Contouring algorithm with geomorphing to avoid costly stitching and abrupt level-of-detail transitions at run-time. We demonstrate that our method can render large procedurally-generated surfaces without any precomputation. We show that our algorithm can approximate sharp features, which is an important requirement for many CAD/CAM/CAE applications.