Fast Rendering of Irregular Grids

We propose a fast algorithm for rendering general irregular grids. Our method uses a sweep-plane approach to accelerate ray casting, and can handle disconnected and nonconvex (even with holes) unstructured irregular grids with a rendering cost that decreases as the "disconnectedness" decreases. The algorithm is carefully tailored to exploit spatial coherenceeven if the image resolution differs substantially from the object space resolution. In this paper, we establish the practicality of our method through experimental results based on our implementation, and we also provide theoretical results, both lower and upper bounds, on the complexity of ray casting of irregular grids. 1 Introduction Volume rendering methods are used to visualize scalar and vector fields by modeling volume as "cloud-like" cells composed of semitransparent material that emits its own light, partially transmits light from other cells, and absorbs some incoming light [31, 17]. The most common input data type is a ..