Parallel visualization of multiple translucent isosurfaces

With the proposed parallel marching cubes (MC) algorithm, we can naturally generate triangles in order, which facilitates the visibility-correct visualization of multiple translucent isosurfaces without performing computational expensive sorting. Upon a commodity graphics processing unit (GPU), our implementation can extract isosurfaces from a high-resolution volume and render the result in real time. The 3D volume is calculated and processed in parallel. The SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) structure of GPU further improves the parallelism of the proposed method. The method extracts and draws triangles, from back to front, according to the viewpoint. The visibility of multilayer translucent isosurfaces is resolved naturally. We solve three levels of order: inter-slab order (the order of slabs), intra-slab order (the order of cells within a slab), and intra-cell order (the order of triangles within a cell). The inter-slab order and intra-slab order are solved by the way similar to "object-aligned slices". The intra-cell order is solved by generating a new triangle table. Experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed parallel MC algorithm.