Implicit Volume Rendering of Generalised Cylinders

CS-TR-94-10

Author: Peter Hall
Source: GZipped PostScript (202kb); Adobe PDF (234kb)


This paper addresses the issue of rendering the interior volume of generalised cylinders that are filled with a semi-translucent material. A point sampling method is proposed. Volumes that are defined by combining generalised cylinders via set theoretic operations may be rendered also. The original motivation for this work was to simulate an x-ray process that is capable of imaging networks of blood vessels. However, the rendering technique is not restricted to that domain and could be used in more general computer graphic applications. The principal characteristic of this rendering technique is that absorption is the only optical effect that is modelled. The method provides algorithmic simplicity, geometrical accuracy, and computational efficiency.

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