Hardware-Assisted Point-Based Volume Rendering of Tetrahedral Meshes

Unstructured volume grids are ubiquitous in scientific computing, and have received substantial interest from the scientific visualization community. In this paper, we take a point-based approach to rendering unstructured grids. In particular, we present a novel method of approximating these irregular elements with point-based primitives amenable to existing hardware acceleration techniques. To improve interactivity to large datasets, we have adapted a level-of-detail strategy. We use a well-known quantitative metric to analyze the image quality achieved by the final rendering.