Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization

The complexity of physical phenomena often varies substantially over space and time. There can be regions where a physical phenomenon/quantity varies very little over a large extent. At the same time, there can be small regions where the same quantity exhibits highly complex variations. Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is a technique used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to simulate phenomena with drastically varying scales concerning the complexity of the simulated variables. Using multiple nested grids of different resolutions, AMR combines the topological simplicity of structured-rectilinear grids, permitting efficient computation and storage, with the possibility to adapt grid resolutions in regions of complex behavior. We present methods for direct volume rendering of AMR data. Our methods utilize AMR grids directly for efficiency of the visualization process. We apply a hardware-accelerated rendering method to AMR data supporting interactive manipulation of color-transfer functions and viewing parameters. We also present a cell-projection-based rendering technique for AMR data.