Practical Reconstruction and Hardware-Accelerated Direct Volume Rendering on Body-Centered Cubic Grids

In volume visualization, the Cartesian grid is by far the most popular type of grid because it is convenient to handle. But it requires 29.3% more samples than the BodyCentered Cubic grid. In order to convince people used to Cartesian grids for years of the advantages of BodyCentered Cubic grids, we must prove their usability in many different volume rendering algorithms. Therefore we introduce several practical reconstruction schemes on Body-Centered Cubic grids, which are very general and can be used in a number of applications and tasks. Together with the development of powerful and flexible consumer graphics hardware, interactive hardwareaccelerated volume rendering algorithms gain popularity. Rendering performance becomes a big issue, which can be a strong argument in favour of Body-Centered Cubic grids. We adapted the projected tetrahedra algorithm to Body-Centered Cubic grids, which is one of the most popular volume rendering approaches exploiting hardwareacceleration. At least partly we succeeded in achieving a performance gain on our new grid and further produced some impressive rendering results comparable to the Cartesian grid version.