[Paraview] volume rendering/ isosurfaces from a adaptive subset of a regular grid.

[Lisa Avila]

Hi Daniel,



>1)  Are hexahedral grid elements the only type supported for unstructured 
>volume rendering and isosurfaces?

Actually, I believe all the unstructured grid volume rendering methods 
currently work on tetra - so ParaView automatically tetrahedralizes your 
data for you before rendering.

>2) Do the faces of the hexahedral elements need to be contiguous? (i.e.. 
>can four small faces meet up with one large face?)

The tetrahedral model can be an arbitrary set of tetrahedra.


>3) Is there any limit on the number of  unstructured grid elements that 
>can be volume rendered with ParaView?

Yes - the current version cannot handle large grids (large being more than 
maybe a few hundred thousand elements) because of the memory overhead of 
the method. Sandia has a nice hardware projection technique which is being 
incorporated in ParaView now - this will handle much larger grids  and will 
be much faster than the current method.


>4) I noticed that KitWare has a phase 1 SBIR for working on AMR 
>visualization. Will this code end up in ParaView?

If we get a Phase II it is likely to show up in ParaView. This is not 
likely to happen very soon - if we get Phase II the funding would not start 
until January I believe. However, the base classes will be in VTK within 
the next month or so.


Lisa