Path tracing for direct volume rendering with web technologies

Žiga Lesar (2018) Path tracing for direct volume rendering with web technologies. MSc thesis.

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Abstract

Rendering of volumetric data is of great significance in numerous fields of science and technology, although it is far from being a trivial task. Interactive and real-time rendering is even more difficult to achieve. Majority of applications nowadays employ primitive methods to reach high execution speeds, and furthermore, they are often accessible only on specific platforms. The web revolution in recent years enabled us to use web browsers to access powerful graphics hardware and in turn build modern graphical application in a platform-agnostic manner. Therefore, in this work we combine state-of-the-art web technology with the latest advancements in volume rendering in a proof-of-concept web application for interactive, real-time and physically correct rendering of volumetric data of arbitrary origin that runs on a wide variety of desktop and mobile devices. The methods used are as general as possible so as to not impose any restrictions on interaction, scene, camera and lighting. With extensibility of the implementation in mind we propose a new pipeline model with a direct support for stochastic methods, which allows for simple extension of existing and fast testing of new rendering methods. With this work we bridge the currently ubiquitous gap between theory and practice in a wide range of use cases.

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