High quality splatting and volume synthesis

Our recent improvements to volume rendering using splatting allow for an accurate functional reconstruction and volume integration, occlusion-based acceleration, post-rendering classification and shading, 3D texture mapping, bump mapping, anti-aliasing and gaseous animation. A pure software implementation requiring low storage and using simple operations has been implemented to easily support these operations. This paper presents a unified framework and discussion of these enhancements, as well as extensions to support hypertextures efficiently. Discussions on appropriate volume models for effective usage of these techniques is also presented.