GPU-based particle systems for illustrative volume rendering

Illustrative techniques are generally applied to produce stylized renderings. Various illustrative styles have been applied to volumetric data sets, producing clearer images and effectively conveying visual information. We adopt user-configurable particle systems to produce stylized renderings from the volume data, imitating traditional pen-and-ink drawings. In the following, we present an interactive GPU-based illustrative framework, called VolFlies-GPU, for rendering volume data, exploiting parallelism in both graphics hardware and particle systems. We achieve real-time interaction and prompt parametrization of the illustrative styles, using an intuitive GPGPU paradigm that delivers the computational power to drive our particle system and visualization algorithms.