Z-diamonds: a Fast Iso-surface Extraction Algorithm for Dynamic Meshes

Dynamic simulation meshes are successfully used in many scientific and engineering fields. We present simple and efficient algorithm for a fast extraction of the iso-surfaces from the data sets with dynamic mesh. Simulation mesh at each time step is preprocessed into a list of diamonds composed of the original mesh cells. The min / max values of all diamonds are stored in a Time-space Partitioning Tree (TSP), which is used to quickly locate the diamonds intersected by a queried iso-surface. To overcome the large memory requirements due to the dynamic changes of a simulation mesh, an out-of-core approach is used to dynamically load geometry of the active diamonds during visualization. We demonstrate our approach on the data sets from the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations.