Visualization of nonconvex and/or cyclic tetrahedral meshes

Tetrahedral meshes are unstructured volume meshes consisting of tetrahedral cells. Each face of each tetrahedron is either part of the boundary of the mesh or identical to the face of another cell. A nonconvex tetrahedral mesh is a tetrahedral mesh with a nonconvex boundary. Cyclic meshes show cyclic occlusions of cells for some projections.

Algorithms for nonconvex and/or cyclic tetrahedral meshes are considerably less efficient and more difficult to implement than their counterparts for convex tetrahedral meshes, e.g. algorithms for

We presented first results about the simplification problem of nonconvex tetrahedral meshes in a [KE00]. As our aim is to accelerate the visualization of tetrahedral meshes in general, we are also considering the rendering step. In [RKE00] we published first results for direct volume rendering and isosurface rendering of tetrahedral meshes. The rendering of cyclic meshes was described in [KE01]. Further hardware acceleration is discussed in [WKE02] and [KE02].

Contact

Manfred Weiler[1]

References

(See also the publications of the VIS group[2].)

[KE00] M. Kraus and T. Ertl. Simplification of Nonconvex Tetrahedral Meshes. In Electronic Proceedings of NSF/DoE Lake Tahoe Workshop for Scientific Visualization, 2000.

[RKE00] S. Röttger, M. Kraus, and T. Ertl. Hardware-Accelerated Volume and Isosurface Rendering Based on Cell-Projection. In Proceedings of IEEE Visualization '00.

[KE01] M. Kraus and T. Ertl. Cell Projection of Cyclic Meshes. In Proceedings of IEEE Visualization '01.

[WKE02] M. Weiler, M. Kraus, and T. Ertl. Hardware-Based View-Independent Cell Projection. In Proceddings of IEEE Symposium on Volume Visualization.

[KE02] M. Kraus and T. Ertl. Implementing Ray Casting in Tetrahedral Meshes with Programmable Graphics Hardware., technical report VIS group, Universität Stuttgart, 2002.

      University of Stuttgart, Institute for Computer Science,
Visualization and Interactive Systems Group

http://www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/eng/research/fields/current/nonconvex/index.html