Direct interactive visualization of locally refined spline volumes for scalar and vector fields

TL;DR

This paper introduces a highly efficient GPU-based method for interactive visualization of volumetric LR-splines, enabling real-time rendering of scalar and vector fields from complex simulation and sensor data.

Contribution

It presents a novel acceleration structure, a change of basis technique, and an adaptive sampling heuristic for fast, interactive visualization of LR-spline volumes on modern GPUs.

Findings

Achieved interactive frame rates for LR-spline volume rendering.

Demonstrated effectiveness on diverse real-world applications.

Compared favorably with existing adaptive visualization approaches.

Abstract

We present a novel approach enabling interactive visualization of volumetric Locally Refined B-splines (LR-splines). To this end we propose a highly efficient algorithm for direct visualization of scalar and vector fields given by an LR-spline. In both cases, our main contribution to achieve interactive frame rates is an acceleration structure for fast element look-up and a change of basis for efficient evaluation. To further improve the efficiency, we present a heuristic for adaptive sampling distance for the numerical integration. A comparison with existing adaptive approaches is performed. The algorithms are designed to fully utilize modern graphics processing unit (GPU) capabilities. Important applications where LR-spline volumes emerge are given for instance by approximation of large-scale simulation and sensor data, and Isogeometric Analysis (IGA). We showcase interactive rendering achieved by our approach on different representative use cases, stemming from simulations of wind flow around a telescope, Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging of a human brain, and simulations of a fluidized bed used for mixing and coating particles in industrial processes.