A Comparison of Rendering Techniques for 3D Line Sets With Transparency

This article presents a comprehensive study of rendering techniques for 3D line sets with transparency. The rendering of transparent lines is widely used for visualizing trajectories of tracer particles in flow fields. Transparency is then used to fade out lines deemed unimportant, based on, for ins...

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
Veröffentlicht in:IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics. - 1996. - 27(2021), 8 vom: 24. Aug., Seite 3361-3376
1. Verfasser: Kern, Michael (VerfasserIn)
Weitere Verfasser: Neuhauser, Christoph, Maack, Torben, Han, Mengjiao, Usher, Will, Westermann, Rudiger
Format: Online-Aufsatz
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: 2021
Zugriff auf das übergeordnete Werk:IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics
Schlagworte:Journal Article
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:This article presents a comprehensive study of rendering techniques for 3D line sets with transparency. The rendering of transparent lines is widely used for visualizing trajectories of tracer particles in flow fields. Transparency is then used to fade out lines deemed unimportant, based on, for instance, geometric properties or attributes defined along with them. Accurate blending of transparent lines requires rendering the lines in back-to-front or front-to-back order, yet enforcing this order for space-filling 3D line sets with extremely high-depth complexity becomes challenging. In this article, we study CPU and GPU rendering techniques for transparent 3D line sets. We compare accurate and approximate techniques using optimized implementations and several benchmark data sets. We discuss the effects of data size and transparency on quality, performance, and memory consumption. Based on our study, we propose two improvements to per-pixel fragment lists and multi-layer alpha blending. The first improves the rendering speed via an improved GPU sorting operation, and the second improves rendering quality via transparency-based bucketing
Beschreibung:Date Revised 01.07.2021
published: Print-Electronic
Citation Status PubMed-not-MEDLINE
ISSN:1941-0506
DOI:10.1109/TVCG.2020.2975795