Far Voxels - A Multiresolution Framework for Interactive Rendering of Huge Complex 3D Models on Commodity Graphics Platforms

Enrico Gobbetti and Fabio Marton
August 2005

Abstract

We present an efficient approach for end-to-end out-of-core construction and interactive inspection of very large arbitrary surface models. The method tightly integrates visibility culling and out-of-core data management with a level-of-detail framework. At preprocessing time, we generate a coarse volume hierarchy by binary space partitioning the input triangle soup. Leaf nodes partition the original data into chunks of a fixed maximum number of triangles, while inner nodes are discretized into a fixed number of cubical voxels. Each voxel contains a compact direction dependent approximation of the appearance of the associated volumetric subpart of the model when viewed from a distance. The approximation is constructed by a visibility aware algorithm that fits parametric shaders to samples obtained by casting rays against the full resolution dataset. At rendering time, the volumetric structure, maintained off-core, is refined and rendered in front-to-back order, exploiting vertex programs for GPU evaluation of view-dependent voxel representations, hardware occlusion queries for culling occluded subtrees, and asynchronous I/O for detecting and avoiding data access latencies. Since the granularity of the multiresolution structure is coarse, data management, traversal and occlusion culling cost is amortized over many graphics primitives. The efficiency and generality of the approach is demonstrated with the interactive rendering of extremely complex heterogeneous surface models on current commodity graphics platforms.

Reference and download information

Enrico Gobbetti and Fabio Marton. Far Voxels - A Multiresolution Framework for Interactive Rendering of Huge Complex 3D Models on Commodity Graphics Platforms. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 24(3): 878-885, August 2005. Proc. SIGGRAPH 2005.

Related multimedia productions

	Enrico Gobbetti and Fabio Marton Far Voxels: Complex Heterogeneous Scene Test Case CRS4 Video n. 129 - Date: 03/2005 Presented at SIGGRAPH 2005, conference held in Los Angeles, CA, August 2005.
	Enrico Gobbetti and Fabio Marton Far Voxels: The 7x777 Test Case CRS4 Video n. 128 - Date: 01/2005 Presented at SIGGRAPH 2005, conference held in Los Angeles, CA, August 2005.
	Enrico Gobbetti and Fabio Marton Far Voxels - A Multiresolution Framework for Interactive Visualization of Huge Complex 3D Datasets on Commodity Graphics Platforms CRS4 Video n. 127 - Date: 01/2005 Presented at SIGGRAPH 2005, conference held in Los Angeles, CA, August 2005.

	Enrico Gobbetti and Fabio Marton Far Voxels: Interactive inspection of a complex heterogeneous scene CRS4 Image n. 17 - January 2005 Presented at SIGGRAPH 2005, conference held in Los Angeles, CA, August, 2005
	Enrico Gobbetti and Fabio Marton Far Voxels: Interactive inspection of the Boeing 777 dataset CRS4 Image n. 16 - January 2005 Presented at SIGGRAPH 2005, conference held in Los Angeles, CA, August, 2005
	Enrico Gobbetti and Fabio Marton Far Voxels: Interactive inspection of the Richtmyer-Meshkov simulation isosurface dataset CRS4 Image n. 15 - January 2005 Presented at SIGGRAPH 2005, conference held in Los Angeles, CA, August, 2005
	Enrico Gobbetti and Fabio Marton Far Voxels: Interactive inspection of the St. Matthew 0.25mm dataset CRS4 Image n. 14 - January 2005 Presented at SIGGRAPH 2005, conference held in Los Angeles, CA, August, 2005

Bibtex citation record

@Article{Gobbetti:2005:FV, author = {Enrico Gobbetti and Fabio Marton}, title = {{Far Voxels} -- A Multiresolution Framework for Interactive Rendering of Huge Complex 3D Models on Commodity Graphics Platforms}, journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics}, volume = {24}, number = {3}, pages = {878--885}, publisher = {ACM Press}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, month = {August}, year = {2005}, abstract = { We present an efficient approach for end-to-end out-of-core construction and interactive inspection of very large arbitrary surface models. The method tightly integrates visibility culling and out-of-core data management with a level-of-detail framework. At preprocessing time, we generate a coarse volume hierarchy by binary space partitioning the input triangle soup. Leaf nodes partition the original data into chunks of a fixed maximum number of triangles, while inner nodes are discretized into a fixed number of cubical voxels. Each voxel contains a compact direction dependent approximation of the appearance of the associated volumetric subpart of the model when viewed from a distance. The approximation is constructed by a visibility aware algorithm that fits parametric shaders to samples obtained by casting rays against the full resolution dataset. At rendering time, the volumetric structure, maintained off-core, is refined and rendered in front-to-back order, exploiting vertex programs for GPU evaluation of view-dependent voxel representations, hardware occlusion queries for culling occluded subtrees, and asynchronous I/O for detecting and avoiding data access latencies. Since the granularity of the multiresolution structure is coarse, data management, traversal and occlusion culling cost is amortized over many graphics primitives. The efficiency and generality of the approach is demonstrated with the interactive rendering of extremely complex heterogeneous surface models on current commodity graphics platforms. }, note = {Proc. SIGGRAPH 2005}, url = {http://www.crs4.it/vic/cgi-bin/bib-page.cgi?id='Gobbetti:2005:FV'}, }