View-dependent Meshing And Rendering of Tetrahedral Meshes

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. We present a meshing framework that builds a multi resolution hierarchy for large tetrahedral meshes and enables to render these meshes interactively using a direct volume renderer based on projected tetrahedra as wall as a new point-based renderer. A preprocessing step simplifies the mesh into a binary vertex hierarchy which is used at run time to adapt the mesh to viewing parameters. A new way of how to split a vertex is presented that exploits the connectivity information of the current mesh as well as the vertex hierarchy.