Accelerated Visualization of Large-Scale Time-Varying Material Simulations Using Programmable Graphics Hardware
Chris Johnson, Dr. Jian Huang

While still getting my feet wet with computer graphics, Dr. Huang and I worked on a relatively simple project. In simulations of massive quantities of atoms depicted as spheres, many vertices have to be shipped out to the graphics card to get nice looking shapes. However, we took the approach of only rendering a single, finely-tessellated sphere and capturing it to a square texture, with the portion outside of the sphere rendered completely transparent. This texture can be mapped to a number of quadrilaterals, each with its own color. With only a few vertices per atom, we achieve the desired effect at a much faster rate.

Jinzhu Gao, Jian Huang, C. Ryan Johnson, Scott Atchley, James Kohl. Distributed Data Management for Large Volume Visualization. Proc. of IEEE Visualization Conference. Minneapolis, MN: October 2005.

Chris Johnson - cjohnson at cs.utk.edu