Have you tried volume rendering?
Its not hard to write a DX module that uses
the SGI Volumizer API to render large data sets
(512^3) in real time on a single pipe.
 
Tom Bartol wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, Chris Pelkie wrote:
> 
> > >My colleagues and I are currently considering presenting our work with
> > >OpenDX at VDE2000.
> > >
> > >Thanks for your offer!
> > >
> > >Tom
> > >
> > >
> >
> > Good! Tom B. has some frighteningly large data sets (bits of brain and
> > stuff), as I remember. Plus, I assume you'd take your FreeBSD openDX, right?
> >
> > Chris Pelkie
> 
> You bet!  Joel and I would come equipped with our Thinkpad 770's (mine
> with FreeBSD, Joel's with Win95) running OpenDX.  Yes, our datasets are
> rather large 3D reconstructions of muscle and brain synapses.  Our "small"
> datasets contain 10's of millions of triangles. The marching cubes
> isosurface extraction step takes a couple Gigs of RAM. We're not sure how
> we're going to do process our "large" datasets.  We'll need algorithms
> that operate "out of core" (i.e. to and from disk cache). And you can just
> forget about rendering these in DX.  RenderMan is very efficient and can
> render out of core (Level of Detail only gets you so far -- how do you
> think they rendered every leaf and blade of grass in "Bug's Life"?).
> Issues related to this would be an interesting topic for discussion at
> VDE2000.
> 
> Tom

-- 
Dr. A. Ballard Andrews
Senior Research Scientist
Schlumberger Doll Research
Old Quarry Road Ridgefield, CT 06877
tel: 203-431-5522 fax: 5521

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