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Volume rendering techniques for scientific visualization have increasingly transitioned toward Monte Carlo (MC) methods in recent years due to their flexibility and robustness. However, their application in multi-channel visualization remains underexplored. Traditional compositing-based approaches often employ arbitrary color blending functions, which lack a physical basis and can obscure data interpretation. We introduce multi-density Woodcock tracking, a simple and flexible extension of Woodcock tracking for multi-channel volume rendering that leverages the strengths of Monte Carlo methods to generate high-fidelity visuals. Our method offers a physically grounded solution for inter-channel color blending and eliminates the need for arbitrary blending functions. We also propose a unified blending modality by generalizing Woodcock's distance tracking method, facilitating seamless integration of alternative blending functions from prior works. Through evaluation across diverse datasets, we demonstrate that our approach maintains real-time interactivity while achieving high-quality visuals by accumulating frames over time. Alper Sahistan, Stefan Zellmann, Nate Morrical, Valerio Pascucci, and Ingo Waldmore » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available January 1, 2026
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Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is a mesh-free method used to simulate volumetric media in fluids, astrophysics, and solid mechanics. Visualizing these simulations is problematic because these datasets often contain millions, if not billions of particles carrying physical attributes and moving over time. Radial basis functions (RBFs) are used to model particles, and overlapping particles are interpolated to reconstruct a high-quality volumetric field; however, this interpolation process is expensive and makes interactive visualization difficult. Existing RBF interpolation schemes do not account for color-mapped attributes and are instead constrained to visualizing just the density field. To address these challenges, we exploit ray tracing cores in modern GPU architectures to accelerate scalar field reconstruction. We use a novel RBF interpolation scheme to integrate per-particle colors and densities, and leverage GPU-parallel tree construction and refitting to quickly update the tree as the simulation animates over time or when the user manipulates particle radii. We also propose a Hilbert reordering scheme to cluster particles together at the leaves of the tree to reduce tree memory consumption. Finally, we reduce the noise of volumetric shadows by adopting a spatially temporal blue noise sampling scheme. Our method can provide a more detailed and interactive view of these large, volumetric, time-series particle datasets than traditional methods, leading to new insights into these physics simulations.more » « less
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