GPU-Assisted High Quality Particle Rendering

Authors: Cha, Deukhyun¹; Son, Sungjin²; Ihm, Insung¹

Source: Computer Graphics Forum, Volume 28, Number 4, June-July 2009 , pp. 1247-1255(9)

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Abstract:

Visualizing dynamic participating media in particle form by fully solving equations from the light transport theory is a computationally very expensive process. In this paper, we present a computational pipeline for particle volume rendering that is easily accelerated by the current GPU. To fully harness its massively parallel computing power, we transform input particles into a volumetric density field using a GPU-assisted, adaptive density estimation technique that iteratively adapts the smoothing length for local grid cells. Then, the volume data is visualized efficiently based on the volume photon mapping method where our GPU techniques further improve the rendering quality offered by previous implementations while performing rendering computation in acceptable time. It is demonstrated that high quality volume renderings can be easily produced from large particle datasets in time frames of a few seconds to less than a minute.

Keywords: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graph; Raytracing, I.3.1 [Computer Graphics]: Hardware Ar; Graphics processors

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01502.x

Affiliations: 1: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sogang University, Korea 2: System Architecture Lab., Samsung Electronics, Korea

Publication date: 2009-06-01