GPU-based Fast Ray Casting for a Large Number of Metaballs

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dc.contributor.authorKanamori, Yoshihiroen_US
dc.contributor.authorSzego, Zoltanen_US
dc.contributor.authorNishita, Tomoyukien_US
dc.date.accessioned2015-02-21T16:18:47Z
dc.date.available2015-02-21T16:18:47Z
dc.date.issued2008en_US
dc.description.abstractMetaballs are implicit surfaces widely used to model curved objects, represented by the isosurface of a density field defined by a set of points. Recently, the results of particle-based simulations have been often visualized using a large number of metaballs, however, such visualizations have high rendering costs. In this paper we propose a fast technique for rendering metaballs on the GPU. Instead of using polygonization, the isosurface is directly evaluated in a per-pixel manner. For such evaluation, all metaballs contributing to the isosurface need to be extracted along each viewing ray, on the limited memory of GPUs. We handle this by keeping a list of metaballs contributing to the isosurface and efficiently update it. Our method neither requires expensive precomputation nor acceleration data structures often used in existing ray tracing techniques. With several optimizations, we can display a large number of moving metaballs quickly.en_US
dc.description.number2en_US
dc.description.seriesinformationComputer Graphics Forumen_US
dc.description.volume27en_US
dc.identifier.doi10.1111/j.1467-8659.2008.01132.xen_US
dc.identifier.issn1467-8659en_US
dc.identifier.pages351-360en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2008.01132.xen_US
dc.publisherThe Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltden_US
dc.titleGPU-based Fast Ray Casting for a Large Number of Metaballsen_US
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