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Updated: Jul 10, 2026

Extracting Metrics for Three-dimensional Root Systems: Volume and Surface Analysis from In-soil X-ray Computed Tomography Data
Published on: April 26, 2016
Interactive isosurface ray tracing of time-varying tetrahedral volumes
Ingo Wald1, Heiko Friedrich, Aaron Knoll
1SCI Institute, University of Utah, USA. wald@sci.utah.edu
Abstract:
We describe a system for interactively rendering isosurfaces of tetrahedral finite-element scalar fields using coherent ray tracing techniques on the CPU. By employing state-of-the art methods in polygonal ray tracing, namely aggressive packet/frustum traversal of a bounding volume hierarchy, we can accomodate large and time-varying unstructured data. In conjunction with this efficiency structure, we introduce a novel technique for intersecting ray packets with tetrahedral primitives. Ray tracing is flexible, allowing for dynamic changes in isovalue and time step, visualization of multiple isosurfaces, shadows, and depth-peeling transparency effects. The resulting system offers the intuitive simplicity of isosurfacing, guaranteed-correct visual results, and ultimately a scalable, dynamic and consistently interactive solution for visualizing unstructured volumes.
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