Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By : Muhammad Mobeen Movania
Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By: Muhammad Mobeen Movania

Overview of this book

OpenGL is the leading cross-language, multi-platform API used by masses of modern games and applications in a vast array of different sectors. Developing graphics with OpenGL lets you harness the increasing power of GPUs and really take your visuals to the next level. OpenGL Development Cookbook is your guide to graphical programming techniques to implement 3D mesh formats and skeletal animation to learn and understand OpenGL. OpenGL Development Cookbook introduces you to the modern OpenGL. Beginning with vertex-based deformations, common mesh formats, and skeletal animation with GPU skinning, and going on to demonstrate different shader stages in the graphics pipeline. OpenGL Development Cookbook focuses on providing you with practical examples on complex topics, such as variance shadow mapping, GPU-based paths, and ray tracing. By the end you will be familiar with the latest advanced GPU-based volume rendering techniques.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
OpenGL Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


Volume rendering techniques are used in various domains in biomedical and engineering disciplines. They are often used in biomedical imaging to visualize the CT/MRI datasets. In mechanical engineering, they are used to visualize intermediate results from FEM simulations, flow, and structural analysis. With the advent of GPU, all of the existing models and methods of visualization were ported to GPU to harness their computational power. This chapter will detail several algorithms that are used for volume visualization on the GPU in OpenGL Version 3.3 and above. Specifically, we will look at three widely used methods including 3D texture slicing, single-pass ray casting with alpha compositing as well as isosurface rendering, and splatting.

After looking at the volume rendering methods, we will look at volume classification by implementing transfer functions. Polygonal isosurfaces are also often generated to extract out classified regions, for example, cellular boundaries. We, therefore...