As a follow-up to our “RTX Beyond Ray Tracing” paper we (Nate, Will, Valerio, and I) also worked on using that paper’s sampling technique within a larger rendering context, where we took this technique, and added some nifty technique for doing efficient space skipping, and, in particular, adaptive sampling on top of this. And happy to say: The paper finally got accepted in the IEEE Vis 2019 short papers track, so Nate will present this in Vancouver later this year.
In the mean time I already uploaded a “authors preprint” of that paper to my publications page (http://www.sci.utah.edu/~wald/Publications/index.html), so if you want to read about it before his talk please feel free to download and read.
The core idea of that paper is, of course, to realize that in a time where we now all have access to fast “traceRay()” operations (in our case on the GPU, but the same should work on a CPU, too) you can of course use that technique to do some sort of hierarchical acceleration of volume rendering, too. In our case, we build a hierarchy over regions of the volume, compute min/max opacity for those regions (for a given transfer function), then use this traceRay operation to step through leaves of this data structure. And for each leaf of this data structure, you can then either skip it, or adjust sample rate, based on how “important” it is (at least for the space skipping side of that a similar idea was recently proposed by David Ganter at HPG, too, though in a somewhat different context).
Details in the paper; go read it… enjoy!
PS: Of course the technique is not restricted to tet meshes. That’s what we demonstrated it on, but it should work for any other type of volumetric data…
Ingo's Blog 