Efficient High-Quality Rendering of Ribbons and Twisted Lines
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Date
2022
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
Flat twisting ribbons are often used for visualizing twists along lines in 3D space. Flat ribbons can disappear when looking at them under oblique angles, and they introduce flickering due to aliasing during animations. We demonstrate that this limitation can be overcome by procedurally rendering generalized cylinders with elliptic profiles. By adjusting the length of the cylinder's semi-minor axis, the ribbon thickness can be controlled so that it always remains visible. The proposed rendering approach further enables the visualization of twists via the projection of a line spiralling around the cylinder's center line. In contrast to texture mapping, this keeps the line width fixed, regardless of the strength of the twist, and provides efficient control over the spiralling frequency and coloring between the twisting lines. The proposed rendering approach can be performed efficiently on recent GPUs by exploiting programmable pulling, mesh shaders and hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
Description
CCS Concepts: Human-centered computing --> Scientific visualization; Computing methodologies --> Rendering
@inproceedings{10.2312:vmv.20221213,
booktitle = {Vision, Modeling, and Visualization},
editor = {Bender, Jan and Botsch, Mario and Keim, Daniel A.},
title = {{Efficient High-Quality Rendering of Ribbons and Twisted Lines}},
author = {Neuhauser, Christoph and Wang, Junpeng and Kern, Michael and Westermann, Rüdiger},
year = {2022},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-189-2},
DOI = {10.2312/vmv.20221213}
}