S. Grottel, G. Reina, T. Zauner, R. Hilfer, T. Ertl
in: Proceedings of SIGRAD 2010: Content aggregation and visualization
edited by: K. Jää-Aro and T. Larsson
Link{\”o}ping Electronic Conference Proceedings, vol. 52,Link{\”o}ping University Electronic Press, Linköping, 45 (2010)
submitted on
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Particle-based modeling and simulation of granular or porous media is a widely-used tool in physics and material science to study behavior like fracture and failure under external force. Classical models use spherical particles. However, up to 108 polyhedral-shaped particles are required to achieve realistic results comparable to laboratory experiments. As contact points and exposed surfaces play important roles for the analysis, a meaningful visualization aiding the numeric analysis has to represent the exact particle shapes. For particle-based data sets with spherical particles, ray tracing has been established as the state-of-the-art approach yielding high rendering performance, optimal visual quality and good scalability. However, when rendering polyhedral-shaped particles, there is no issue with visual quality comparing polygon-based rendering approaches and ray casting, whereas the polygon-based approaches cause significantly lower fragment load. The paper at hand investigates the advantages and drawbacks of both approaches by analyzing the performance of state-of-the-art rendering methods employing vertex-buffer objects, hardware-supported instancing, geometry shader, and GPU-based ray casting.
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