We describe first steps toward implementing two-level volume rendering (abbreviated as 2lVR) on consumer PC graphics hardware. Two-level volume rendering allows to combine local per-object rendering modes, like direct volume rendering (DVR) and maximum intensity projection (MIP), with a global compositing mode for combining the contributions of different objects embedded in a segmented volume d...

Volume rendering is a key technique in scientific visualization that lends itself to significant exploitable parallelism. The high computational demands of real-time volume rendering and continued technological advances in the area of VLSI give impetus to the development of special-purpose volume rendering architectures. This paper presents and characterizes three recently developed volume rend...

In the past ten years, volume rendering tools have been progressively adopted by the geophysical community. The emergence of high-end graphics workstations with 3D texture capabilities made real-time volume rendering possible. Many interactive volume rendering packages are now available for seismic interpretation. However, interpretation is still mostly done in 2D. This is mainly due to the hig...

ParaView is a popular open-source general-purpose scientific visualization application. One of the many visualization tools available within ParaView is the volume rendering of unstructured meshes. Volume rendering is a technique that renders a mesh as a translucent solid, thereby allowing the user to see every point in three-dimensional space simultaneously. Because volume rendering is computa...

A parallel volume rendering system for unstructured grid volume data is proposed in this paper. By implementing the mechanism for dynamic load balancing into the system, the authors solve the issue of load imbalance due to the view dependency and run-time features of early ray termination. An experimental implementation of the system achieved a 4.32-times performance

In order to efficiently and effectively reconstruct 3D medical images and clearly display the detailed information of inner structures and the inner hidden interfaces between different media, an Improved Volume Rendering Optical Model (IVROM) for medical translucent volume rendering and its implementation using the preintegrated Shear-Warp Volume Rendering algorithm are proposed in this paper, ...

Volume rendering with texture mapping hardware is a fast volume rendering method available on high-end workstations. However, limited texture memory often prevents the method from being used to render large volume data efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new approach to fast rendering of large volume data with texture mapping hardware. Based on a new volume-loading pipeline, the volume dat...

Transfer functions are fundamentals for direct volume rendering to visualize object through mapping optical properties to the voxel data values. One aspect of direct volume rendering which has received no attention in transfer function design is the use of voxel position in transfer functions. Often, there are features of interest in volume data that are visualized or not depending on their vox...

This paper is an introduction to non-photorealistic volume rendering and shall give an overview of the terms used and the main concepts. Recently the focus of research has concentrated on photorealistic rendering of 3D volume datasets. To overcome the constraints of photorealistic visualization new methods were found using nonphotorealistic rendering techniques. We present a comprehensible intr...