04/01/1992 09:00 AM
Computer Science
Curvilinear grids are composed of six-sided cells which may be considered as resulting from the deformation of a regular rectilinear grid. Unlike regular grids the cells may not be identical in shape, size or orientation. Such grids occur in areas such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element methods. Direct volume rendering can be a useful tool for visualizing scalar data on curvilinear grids from CFD. It is possibly more desirable for such smoothly varying fields than isosurface methods that use binary thresholding. Volume rendering research has largely concentrated on rendering scalar fields on regular grids, and recent algorithms allow nearly interactive renderings on moderately sized volumes. These techniques do not readily carry over to rendering curvilinear grids. Curvilinear grids pose a number of challenges to a volume rendering algorithm. In this report, we discuss the problems of ray-casting curvilinear grids and present techniques for speedup at the expense of extra storage.
