Volume Rendering for Curvilinear and Unstructured Grids

We discuss two volume rendering methods developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The first, cell projection, renders the polygons in the projection of each cell. It requires a global visibility sort in order to composite the cells in back to front order, and we discuss several different algorithms for this sort. The second method uses regularly spaced slice planes perpendicular to the X, Y, or Z axes, which slice the cells into polygons. Both methods are supplemented with anti-aliasing techniques to deal with small cells that might fall between pixel samples or slice planes, and both have been parallelized.