[vtkusers] Bricking

[eugen]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:28:06 +0100, Kevin H. Hobbs <hobbsk at ohiou.edu>  
wrote:

> On Mon, 2007-03-19 at 18:40 +0100, eugen wrote:
>>
>> Sounds exactly what I'm looking for!!! I've read about streaming in VTK
>> some time ago, but thought it was not applicable to volume rendering...
>>
>
> I can see how it would seem inapplicable: all of the descriptions of
> streaming talk about little block like pieces, while it would seem that
> for volume rendering one would need all of the data visible through a
> section of the screen in sort of an expanding square. The important bit
> should be just the load a little, process a little, write a little part.
>

How can I achieve this? Any idea for a pipeline with  
vtkVolumeTextureMapper3D at the end?
The clue would be to split the volume somehow into bricks/chunks  (I think  
vtkExtractVIO would work). A brick would be small enough to go into  
texturememory. Than I would have to sort the bricks in back-to-front order  
somehow and render them one after one with the vtkVolumeTextureMapper3D!  
Doxygen says vtkVolumeTextureMapper3D supports multiple volumes only if  
they can be sorted back-to-front. vtkFrustumCoverageCuller should be used.  
But as I'm still a newbe to VTK I don't have any clue how to do that!  
AGAIN: my volume is bigger than my texturememory. So I want to split the  
volume into smaller chunks, sort them and render them with  
vtkVolumeTextureMapper3D. Waht is the best/efficient way to do that? I was  
already thinking of extending vtkVolumeTextureMapper3D...

Any help?