The Inverse Warp: Non-Invasive Integration of Shear-Warp Volume Rendering into Polygon Rendering Pipelines

In this paper, a simple and efficient solution for combining shear-warp volume rendering and the hardware graphics pipeline is presented. The approach applies an inverse warp transformation to the Z-Buffer, containing the rendered geometry. This information is used for combining geometry and volume data during compositing. We present applications of this concept which include hybrid volume rendering, i.e., concurrent rendering of polygonal objects and volume data, and volume clipping on convex clipping regions. Furthermore, it can be used to efficiently define regions with different rendering modes and transfer functions for focus+context volume rendering. Empirical results show that the approach has very low impact on performance.