Visualization of grids conforming to geological structures: a topological approach

Flexible grids are used in many Geoscience applications because they can accurately adapt to the great diversity of shapes encountered in nature. These grids raise a number difficult challenges, in particular for fast volume visualization. We propose a generic incremental slicing algorithm for versatile visualization of unstructured grids, these being constituted of arbitrary convex cells. The tradeoff between the complexity of the grid and the efficiency of the method is addressed by special-purpose data structures and customizations. A general structure based on oriented edges is defined to address the general case. When only a limited number of polyhedron types is present in the grid (zoo grids), memory usage and rendering time are reduced by using a catalog of cell types generated automatically. This data structure is further optimized to deal with stratigraphic grids made of hexahedral cells. The visualization method is applied to several gridded subsurface models conforming to geological structures. r 2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd.