Visualization of Time-Varying Curvilinear Grids Using a 3D Warp Texture

We present a novel scheme to interactively visualize time-varying scalar elds dened on a curvilinear grid. We create a 3D warp texture that maps points in R 3 into the grid coordinate system. At rendering time, the warping function is reconstructed at each fragment using tri-linear interpolation, and provides the 3D texture coordinates required to look up a scalar eld value stored in a separate scalar texture. In essence, this approach reduces the problem of rendering a curvilinear grid to the problem of rendering a regular grid with one additional texture lookup. Because the curvilinear grid data typically lies on a regular grid in its native space, the scalar data is easily stored in a 3D texture without the need for explicit resampling. For many time-varying data sets, the warping function itself is constant over time, so only the 3D scalar texture needs to be reloaded with each time step. Thus this factorization of the problem minimizes the bandwidth requirements for time-varying playback. We demonstrate the approach on several data sets, achieving interactive performance with low approximation error.