Interactive Visualization of Large Higher-Order Tetrahedral Data (Paperback)

Computational simulations frequently generate solutions defined over very large tetrahedral volume meshes containing millions of elements. Furthermore, solutions over these meshes may often be expressed using non-linear basis functions. Certain solution techniques may even produce non-conforming meshes. Such data is difficult to visualize interactively, as it is far too large to fit in memory and many common data reduction techniques cannot be applied to non-conforming meshes. Common linear interpolation method cannot faithfully and accurately evaluate the non-linear solutions. In this book, three different methods are proposed to provide accurate, interactive and efficient visualization. The surface method introduces pixel-exact evaluation of higher-order solution data on the GPU, which demonstrates the importance of per-pixel rendering versus linear interpolation for producing high quality visualizations. The interactive volume method adaptively samples points from non-linear solution, decimates points at run time to fit GPU memory limits, and renders them order-independently. The feature method improves efficiency by sampling over feature partitions via TetGrid.