Interactive Isosurface Ray Tracing of Large Octree Volumes

Abstract

We present a technique for ray tracing isosurfaces of large compressed structured volumes. Data is first converted into a lossless-compression octree representation that occupies a fraction of the original memory footprint. An isosurface is then dynamically rendered by tracing rays through a min/max hierarchy inside interior octree nodes. By embedding the acceleration tree and scalar data in a single structure and employing optimized octree hash schemes, we achieve competitive frame rates on common multicore architectures, and render large time-variant data that could not otherwise be accommodated