A polygonal approximation to direct scalar volume rendering

Abstract

One method of directly rendering a three-dimensional volume of scalar data is to project each cell in a volume onto the screen. Rasterizing a volume cell is more complex than rasterizing a polygon. A method is presented that approximates tetrahedral volume cells with hardware renderable transparent triangles. This method produces results which are visually similar to more exact methods for scalar volume rendering, but is faster and has smaller memory requirements. The method is best suited for display of smoothly-changing data.