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Abstract

Volumetric textures are often used to increase the visual
complexity of an object without increasing the polygon count.
Although it is much more efficient in terms of memory to store
only the volume close to the surface and to determine the
overall shape by a triangle mesh, rendering is much more
complicated compared to a single volume. We present a new
rendering method for volumetric textures which allows highest
quality at interactive rates even for semi-transparent volumes.
The method is based on 3D texture mapping where hundreds of
planes orthogonal to the viewing direction are rendered back to
front slicing the 3D surface volume. This way we are able to
correctly display semi-transparent objects and generate
precise silhouettes. The core problem is to calculate the
intersection of prisms formed by extruding the triangles of the
mesh along their normals and the rendering planes. We present
two solutions, a hybrid and a purely hardware-based approach.