Interactive Direct Volume Rendering of Time-Varying Data

Previous efforts aimed at improving direct volume rendering performance have focused largely on time-invariant, 3D data. Little work has been done in the area of interactive direct volume rendering of time-varying data, such as is commonly found in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. Until recently, the additional costs imposed by time-varying data have made consideration of interactive direct volume rendering impractical. We present a volume rendering system based on a parallel implementation of the Shear-Warp Factorization algorithm that is capable of rendering time-varying 1283 data at interactive speeds.