[vtkusers] would data type affect volume rendering?

[Ken Martin]

Data type and scaling definitely have an impact on quality and performance.
Generally you want to use the smallest data type that can fully represent
your data.

For example if your data consisted of only integer values between 1020 and
1120 you could store it as a float volume or int volume but that would be
more than you need. Better would be to use unsigned short or short as those
are 16 bits as opposed to 32 bits and short can fully represent it. If you
really want to maximize performance you could shift the data from
(1020,1120) down to (0,100) at which point you could use unsigned char to
represent the data.  You just have to keep track of that shift in your GUI
and transfer functions etc.

Thanks
Ken


On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 10:03 AM, Weiguang guan <guanw at rhpcs.mcmaster.ca>
wrote:

> Hi VTK users,
>
> I have an integer volume dataset. I wonder if I convert it to other data
> type (float, for example), would rendering of the new float volume be
> different from that of the original integer volume in terms of speed and
> quality? My second question is that if I scaled down the data by dividing a
> scalar during the conversion, would the rendering of new volume have poorer
> quality? Thanks.
>
> Best,
> Weiguang
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Ken Martin PhD
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Kitware Inc.
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