CPU volume rendering of adaptive mesh refinement data

Abstract

Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) methods are widespread in scientific computing, and visualizing the resulting data with efficient and accurate rendering methods can be vital for enabling interactive data exploration. In this work, we detail a comprehensive solution for directly volume rendering block-structured (Berger-Colella) AMR data in the OSPRay interactive CPU ray tracing framework. In particular, we contribute a general method for representing and traversing AMR data using a kd-tree structure, and four different reconstruction options, one of which in particular (the basis function approach) is novel compared to existing methods. We demonstrate our system on two types of block-structured AMR data and compressed scalar field data, and show how it can be easily used in existing production-ready applications through a prototypical integration in the widely used visualization program ParaView.