GPU Construction and Transparent Rendering of Iso-Surfaces

Peter Kipfer, Rüdiger Westermann
Computer Graphics and Visualization Group, Technische Universität München, Germany

Background

Iso-surface construction and rendering on programmable graphics hardware has recently been shown for tetrahedral grids. In this paper, we present a novel edge-based approach that avoids redundant computations of edge--surface intersections. We show how to achieve a significant performance gain by considering intrinsic features of recent GPUs. The iso-surface extraction process is re-formulated in a way that reduces both numerical computations and memory access operations. A span-space data structure allows us to avoid the processing of elements not intersected by the selected surface. Finally, to allow for the rendering of transparent surfaces, a GPU sorting routine is integrated into the rendering pass. Our applications show numerical simulation results, distance volumes and advanced shading effects.