Real-Time Rendering of Dynamic Line Sets using Voxel Ray Tracing

Abstract

Real-time rendering of dynamic line sets is relevant in many visualization tasks, including unsteady flow visualization and interactive white matter reconstruction from Magnetic Resonance Imaging. High-quality global illumination and transparency are important for conveying the spatial structure of dense line sets, yet remain difficult to achieve at interactive rates. We propose an efficient voxel-based ray-tracing framework for rendering large dynamic line sets with ambient occlusion and ground-truth transparency. We introduce a voxelization algorithm that supports efficient on-the-fly construction of acceleration structures for both voxel cone tracing and ray tracing. To further reduce per-frame preprocessing cost, we propose a voxel-based culling method that restricts acceleration structure construction to camera-visible voxels. Together, these contributions enable real-time rendering of large-scale dynamic line sets with high quality and physically accurate transparency. We demonstrate that our method outperforms the state of the art in quality and performance when rendering (semi-)opaque dynamic line sets.