[vtkusers] opengl volumizer

[Robert Belleman]

Hi,

I see no one else answered your question, so I'll
take a shot.

Yes; OpenGL|Volumizer is capable of volume rendering
very large image data sets. In theory you should be
able to distribute the rendering over multiple pipes
(using SGI's Multipipe SDK) to obtain scalable volume
rendering, but we haven't seen that working in
cooperation with VTK (yet; we are at the moment in
contact with SGI about this).

We do know from experience that the performance of
Volumizer on SGI hardware can be excellent. In fact,
good enough for use in immersive virtual environments
such as a CAVE, which is where we have frequently
used Volumizer in the past.

The VTK classes supplied with Volumizer by SGI are
quite simple: designed for an old VTK version, lookup
tables size is fixed to 256 entries, no color lookup
tables, just luminance, etc. We have extended these
classes; contact me if you want those changes.

I have no idea how Volumizer's speed compares to VTK's
new 3D texturing classes. It would definitely be
interesting to find out.

Hope that helps,
-- Rob

-- 
Robert Belleman, PhD, Informatics Inst.,  Faculty of Science
Universiteit van Amsterdam, Kruislaan 403, 1098 SJ Amsterdam
the Netherlands. Tel: +31 20 525 7510 - Fax: +31 20 525 7419
http://www.science.uva.nl/~robbel/  -  robbel at science.uva.nl



powerhouseofexcellence wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I was browsing the net and came across something called SGI Opengl
> Volumizer. Their site says they can render 'gigabytes' of image data.
> I continued reading and found out that there is a vtk class to wrap
> that functionality.
> 
> Is this true, which classes must you use to take advantage of this
> performance? (And is the performace really that great? I know there
> recently has been a 3d texture volume rendering class created for vtk,
> is the SGI one any faster?)
> 
> Thanks!
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