CellFast: Interactive unstructured volume rendering

tetrahedral cell, irregular grid, volume visualization, OpenGL, visibility sorting, quicksort, triangle fan Shirley and Tuchman's projected tetrahedra approach is a fast algorithm for unstructured volume visualization, because it generates triangles that may be rendered by hardware acceleration. In this paper, I explore optimizations using OpenGL triangle fans, customized quicksort, memory organization for cache efficiency, display lists, and tetrahedral culling. The optimizations improve the performance of projected tetrahedra rendering to provide 1 frame/second for 240,122 tetrahedral cells, 3 frames/second for 70,125 tetrahedral cells, and 15 frames/second for 12,936 tetrahedral cells. Resolutions of 3840x1024 were rendered by using the HP-Visualize Center at full frame rates