[vtkusers] Texture-mapping based volume rendering

[Lisa Avila]

Hello Weiguang,

There is an end-user application (VolView) built on top of VTK that has 3D 
texture mapping support on Windows for some Nvidia and ATI cards - you can 
find info on it here (http://www.kitware.com/products/volview.html) and 
download it to test out performance on your system.

Performance tends to be fairly good - although we do use a few 
"level-of-detail" tricks to ensure interactive performance (at least 
several frames per second) for large datasets rendered into large images. 
In addition, since texture download rates are still awful, we do not render 
data bigger than can fit in texture memory on the card (automatic 
downsampling is used) - which often leads to a limit of 256x256x128 when 
you consider all the "extra" data necessary to produce a shaded image that 
has transfer functions based on both scalar value and gradient opacity...

Lisa



At 10:39 AM 2/25/2004, Weiguang Guan wrote:
>Hi everyone,
>
>Does vtk implement texture mapping based volume rendering which utilizes
>modern graphics card's 3D texture mapping capability? It could make volume
>rendering much faster without using special hardware (like VolumePro).
>Has anyone made a performace comparison of different rendering
>techniques (in terms of sec or ms on 256 cubic volume)? Thanks.
>
>Weiguang
>
>--
>========================================================
>Weiguang Guan, Research Engineer
>RHPCS, McMaster University
>========================================================
>
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