J0104-1-5 Realization of Time-Critical Rendering for Large-Scale Particle Visualization

Abstract

When visualizing large-scale particle systems, it is difficult to maintain adequate framerates because we have to render dynamic scenes with a large amount of small spheres. In this article, we propose a time-critical rendering (TCR) scheme which uses a high-quality, implicit surface method in combination with a fast method based on shaded texture mapping. In our scheme, the method for rendering each of the particles is determined on the fly with reference to the distance between the center of the particle and the base point defined as the viewpoint or gaze. In order to apply the TCR scheme to walkthrough animation, a threshold used for switching the two rendering methods is dynamically changed for the actual framerates to fit into a prespecified closed interval. We used a molecular dynamics simulation dataset to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our TCR scheme.