Tech Report CS-02-17

Directly Rendering Spectral Elements Using Texture Shaders

Bernard Peng and Andrew Forsberg

2002

Abstract:

We present a method to directly render data represented by high order polynomials on geometries using the Texture Shader in new graphics hardware. This work is motivated by the larger problem of understanding 3D fluid flow data sets and spectral elements, a data structure for representing simulated flow data. Our contributions include a way to interactively render surface data by evaluating and color mapping a high order Lagrange polynomial for every surface point in real-time. We have implemented this using OpenGL and NVIDIA s GeForce3 graphics cards.

(complete text in pdf or gzipped postscript)