Techniques for Interactive and Interrogative Scientific Volumetric Visualization

This paper presents some key aspects of VISUAL3, a highly-interactive visualization environment for the investigation and interrogation of 3D volumetric scientific data. First, the program architecture and data structure are described. This supports both structured and unstructured grids with minimum memory requirements for large data-sets. Second, methods are presented for avoiding the need to perform extremely expensive searches over large data-sets. This greatly speeds up the interactivity of critial processes. Third, an important new rendering idea is introduced for dynamic situations in which the transformation matrix and most of a complex object is static and only a small part of the object is changing. 1 Introduction VISUAL3[1][2] is a highly interactive 3D volumetric visualization environment. It was originally designed to be able to view the types of data that are currently generated by the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) community but it is not limited to CFD. VISUAL3 de..