• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.21-28
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• 2001

As a result of the recent explosive growth of scientific data, extremely large volume datasets have become increasingly commonplace. While several texture-based volume rendering algorithms have been proposed, most of them focused on volumes smaller than the hardware's available texture memory. This paper presents a new parallel volume rendering scheme for very large static and time-varying data on a multipipe system architecture. Our scheme subdivides large volumes dynamically into smaller bricks, and assigns them adaptively to graphics pipes to minimize the costs of texture swapping. With the new method, Phong shaded images can be easily created by computing the gradients on the fly and using the color matrix feature of OpenGL. We report experimental results on an SGI Onyx2 for the various large datasets.