View-dependent tetrahedral meshing and rendering

Interactive exploration of huge tetrahedral meshes is required by many applications but the limitations of the current hardware do not allow for the full dataset to be rendered at interactive frame rates. Multi resolution representations are an important tool to adapt the tetrahedral mesh complexity to the current viewing parameters in real time rendering environments.We present a meshing framework that builds a compact multi resolution representation for large tetrahedral meshes. A preprocessing step simplifies the mesh into a binary vertex hierarchy which is used at run time to adapt the mesh to viewing parameters. Exploiting the redundancy in the connectivity information of the mesh enables us to store the vertex hierarchy compactly such that a vertex split or edge collapse can be performed by knowing incremental updates only.We integrated this multiresolution representation into a volume rendering environment that supports direct volume rendering as well as a new point based rendering approach.