Project Week 25/Next Generation GPU Volume Rendering

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Key Investigators

Project Description

Objective Approach and Plan Progress and Next Steps

Develop a specification for the next generation of GPU volume processing and rendering in VTK and Slicer

The specification should support

  • Multiple input volumes for ray-casting and slice-based volume rendering
  • GPU-based volume slicing and compositing
  • Programmable volume rendering shader
  • Smart management of volumes in GPU memory
  • Possibility to run simple processing operations on the volume (e.g. Non-linear transforms)
  • Consider possible complications
    • GPU features not available / software only fallback
    • Volumes too big to for GPU memory

Compare the architectures of different existing projects where parts of the required functionality has been implemented:

Determine a sensible way to integrate all those contribution in VTK.

TODO

Illustrations

3D Image Filters in WebGL2

Multivolume rendering and nonlinear transforms in WebGL2

Background and References

Some notes about sharing GLSL code between desktop OpenGL and WebGL

Planning hangout June 13

(Simon, Jc, Alvaro, Sankhesh, Steve, Hina)

Recent features in VTK Volume Rendering (in master, blog post coming)

  • Volume peeling - translucent geometry with volumes in GPU ray cast mapper
  • Render to texture
  • 2D lookup tables (value and gradient magnitude)

Work in progress

  • Overlapping volumes - multiple inputs to mapper
  • vtk charts to work with 2D transfer functions

Slicer to migrate to latest version once cmake hierarchy is sorted out (Jc)

Questions / discussion points:

  • Ray cast vs view aligned plane-based algorithms
    • depth of focus, shadows, diffuse lighting...
    • How to integrate multiple features
  • Nonlinear transformation
  • Custom shaders
  • Dynamic shader generation in python
  • multiple components
    • RGBA
    • Independent components?
  • 2D lookup tables
  • Volumes that live on the GPU
    • sharing across contexts
    • use as input textures and render targets
    • tiling?
    • streaming?
  • Large volumes?
  • Mesa backend?
    • Offscreen support for OpenGL2 backend should work in VTK now