Efficient Direct Isosurface Rasterization of Scalar Volumes

Abstract

In this paper we propose a novel and efficient rasterization-based approach for direct rendering of isosurfaces. Our method exploits the capabilities of task and mesh shader pipelines to identify subvolumes containing potentially visible isosurface geometry, and to efficiently extract primitives which are consumed on the fly by the rasterizer. As a result, our approach requires little preprocessing and negligible additional memory. Direct isosurface rasterization is competitive in terms of rendering performance when compared with ray-marching-based approaches, and significantly outperforms them for increasing resolution in most situations. Since our approach is entirely rasterization based, it affords straightforward integration into existing rendering pipelines, while allowing the use of modern graphics hardware features, such as multi-view stereo for efficient rendering of stereoscopic image pairs for geometry-bound applications. Direct isosurface rasterization is suitable for applications where isosurface geometry is highly variable, such as interactive analysis scenarios for static and dynamic data sets that require frequent isovalue adjustment.