Hardware-Accelerated Visualization of Curvilinear Vector Fields

We present a novel method for hardwareaccelerated texture advection of 3D velocity fields defined on curvilinear grids. For uniform rectilinear grids, texture advection can be efficiently performed within the rasterization unit by existing approaches. In a pre-processing step, the vector field is transformed from the curvilinear grid (P-Space) to a uniform rectilinear grid (C-Space). Hardware accelerated texture advection is performed via per-pixel operations in C-Space. The resulting 3D volume data is displayed by direct volume rendering via 3D textures. The decomposition of the volume object into viewport-aligned slices is performed in P-Space and the resulting polygons are textured with the image information calculated in C-Space.