Volume Rendering
Drew Whitehouse,ANU Supercomputer Facility
The following are some examples of the sort of visualization work I've been doing with my home grown volume renderer/raytracer OORAY (object-oriented raytracer, okay it's a bit cliche'd but it could be worse eg metaray, vol, vren, volren etc etc :-.).
A few of OORAY's nice features
- Object oriented - it's written in C++ (grudgingly), and after 3 rewrites of the foundation object system, it's a pleasure to HACK. I've found it useful for all sorts of experimentation eg as a second stage postprocesser of a light scattering simulation. I've also have versions of it running in parallel under MPI, Fujitsu AP1000 native communication library, and it ran under under CMMD on CM's for a while.
- it can render geometry and volumes(s) together (eg see the Global Climate modelling (GCM) stuff below.
- It can render volumes on spheres, useful for GCM work.
Examples
- The classic UNC MRI data set.
- An astrophysical data set of the accretion disk formed around a
black hole(Meglicki et al). You may have seen this data set in SGI's
Inventor Mentor book. Note the second collage has two voolume
data sets (density - green/red, temperature in blue/red) where you can
see the hot low-denisty "jets" shooting out along the axis. The third
is a transparent iso-surface of the density with a volume data set
representing the velocity squared.
- Jets in a fluid (Singleton and Rudman). Species data set.
- Global climate model (CCM1), temperature data set, run on the ANU
ported parallel code on the Fujitsu AP1000. Although nice to look at
I'm not convinced that the second spherical mapping is a better way to
look at this sort of data ?
- Multiple scattering of light in the atmosphere, for computer
graphics, see tech
report (Whitehouse)
