Volume rendering

Volume rendering is a technique for directly displaying a sampled 3D scalar field without first fitting geometric primitives to the samples. We are working on developing efficient and accurate algorithms for displaying this sort of data. Our goal is photorealistic real-time volume rendering of usefully large scientific, engineering, and medical datasets on affordable noncustom hardware. We have also worked on techniques for morphing volumes.

The project represented by this web page has been inactive for several years. However, there are two new efforts related to volume rendering that are currently going on in our laboratory. The first is a project to incorporate volume rendering into the Stanford Real-Time Programmable Shading Language and to build a parallelized volume renderer for our 32-processor PC cluster. This project is under the direction of Pat Hanrahan. The second is a project to create a book of volume renderings, tentatively called Volumegraphica. Here is a talk about that sabbatical-style project, which is still incomplete in 2021.

People:

• Chase Garfinkle < [email protected] >
• Phil Lacroute < [email protected] >
• Apostolos Lerios < [email protected] >
• Marc Levoy

Recent papers in this area:

Real-Time Volume Rendering on Shared Memory Multiprocessors Using the Shear-Warp Factorization

Philippe Lacroute

Proc. 1995 Parallel Rendering Symposium

Feature-Based Volume Metamorphosis

Apostolos Lerios, Chase D. Garfinkle, and Marc Levoy

Proc. SIGGRAPH '95

Fast Volume Rendering Using a Shear-Warp Factorization of the Viewing Transformation

Philippe Lacroute and Marc Levoy

Proc. SIGGRAPH '94

Frequency Domain Volume Rendering

Takashi Totsuka and Marc Levoy

Proc. SIGGRAPH '93

Some older papers:

Display of Surfaces from Volume Data

Marc Levoy

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 8, No., 3, May, 1988

Click here for an historical note about the error in this paper

A Hybrid Ray Tracer for Rendering Polygon and Volume Data

Marc Levoy

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 10, No. 2, March, 1990, pp. 33-40.

Efficient Ray Tracing of Volume Data

Marc Levoy/a>

ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 9, No. 3, July, 1990, pp. 245-261.

Volume Rendering by Adaptive Refinement

Marc Levoy

The Visual Computer, Vol. 6, No. 1, February, 1990, pp. 2-7.

Volume Rendering in Radiation Treatment Planning

Marc Levoy et al.,

Proc. First Conference on Visualization in Biomedical Computing, IEEE Computer Society Press, Atlanta, Georgia, May, 1990, pp. 4-10.

Available software and data:

• The VolPack Volume Rendering Library.
• The Stanford volume data archive

Demos:

• Sample volume renderings made using the VolPack Volume Rendering Library.
• Several 3D volume morphs.
• Miscellaneous (mostly old) volume renderings made by Marc Levoy.

A list of technical papers, with abstracts and pointers to additional information, is also available. Or you can return to the research projects page or our home page.