Screen-space Silhouettes for Visualizing Ensembles of 3D Isosurfaces
Ismail Demir, Johannes Kehrer, Rüdiger Westermann
Computer Graphics and Visualization Group, Technische Universität München, Germany
Background
Visualizing sets of isosurfaces from 3D scalar ensemble fields is a difficult task due to inherent occlusion effects, yet it is often required to analyze the uncertainty represented by such an ensemble. In this paper, we present a novel visualization technique for ensembles of isosurfaces based on screen-space silhouettes. By using silhouettes, the displayed information is reduced to avoid occlusions, yet the major shape of the surfaces can be maintained. Our approach preserves spatial coherence and does not make any assumption about the underlying surface distribution. By providing additional mechanisms, i.e., picking, clustering, cutting and animation, we enable the user to explore an ensemble of surfaces interactively.
Acknowledgment
Access to ECMWF prediction data has been kindly provided in the context of the ECMWF special project "Support Tool for HALO Missions". We are grateful to the special project members Marc Rautenhaus and Andreas Dörnbrack for providing the ECMWF ENS dataset of 17 October 2012. This work was supported by the European Union under the ERC Advanced Grant 291372 - SaferVis - Uncertainty Visualization for Reliable Data Discovery.