A Comparison of Rendering Techniques for 3D Line Sets with Transparency

Michael Kern, Christoph Neuhauser, Torben Maack, Mengjiao Han, Will Usher, Rudiger Westermann

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

This article presents a comprehensive study of rendering techniques for 3D line sets with transparency. The rendering of transparent lines is widely used for visualizing trajectories of tracer particles in flow fields. Transparency is then used to fade out lines deemed unimportant, based on, for instance, geometric properties or attributes defined along with them. Accurate blending of transparent lines requires rendering the lines in back-to-front or front-to-back order, yet enforcing this order for space-filling 3D line sets with extremely high-depth complexity becomes challenging. In this article, we study CPU and GPU rendering techniques for transparent 3D line sets. We compare accurate and approximate techniques using optimized implementations and several benchmark data sets. We discuss the effects of data size and transparency on quality, performance, and memory consumption. Based on our study, we propose two improvements to per-pixel fragment lists and multi-layer alpha blending. The first improves the rendering speed via an improved GPU sorting operation, and the second improves rendering quality via transparency-based bucketing.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9007507
Pages (from-to)3361-3376
Number of pages16
JournalIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Volume27
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Aug 2021

Keywords

  • Scientific visualization
  • line rendering
  • order-independent transparency

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