Rapid advances in 3-D scientific visualization have made a major impact on the display of behavior. The use of 3-D has become a key component of both academic research and commercial product development in the field of engineering design. Computer Visualization presents a unified collection of computer graphics techniques for the scientific visualization of behavior. The book combines a basic overview of the fundamentals of computer graphics with a practitioner-oriented review of the latest 3-D graphics display and visualization techniques. Each chapter is written by well-known experts in the field. The first section reviews how computer graphics visualization techniques have evolved to work with digital numerical analysis methods. The fundamentals of computer graphics that apply to the visualization of analysis data are also introduced. The second section presents a detailed discussion of the algorithms and techniques used to visualize behavior in 3-D, as static, interactive, or animated imagery. It discusses the mathematics of engineering data for visualization, as well as providing the current methods used for the display of scalar, vector, and tensor fields. It also examines the more general issues of visualizing a continuum volume field and animating the dimensions of time and motion in a state of behavior. The final section focuses on production visualization capabilities, including the practical computational aspects of visualization such as user interfaces, database architecture, and interaction with a model. The book concludes with an outline of successful practical applications of visualization, and future trends in scientific visualization.

Rapid advances in 3-D scientific visualization have made a major impact on the display of behavior. The use of 3-D has become a key component of both academic research and commercial product development in the field of engineering design. Computer Visualization presents a unified collection of computer graphics techniques for the scientific visualization of behavior. The book combines a basic overview of the fundamentals of computer graphics with a practitioner-oriented review of the latest 3-D graphics display and visualization techniques. Each chapter is written by well-known experts in the field. The first section reviews how computer graphics visualization techniques have evolved to work with digital numerical analysis methods. The fundamentals of computer graphics that apply to the visualization of analysis data are also introduced. The second section presents a detailed discussion of the algorithms and techniques used to visualize behavior in 3-D, as static, interactive, or animated imagery. It discusses the mathematics of engineering data for visualization, as well as providing the current methods used for the display of scalar, vector, and tensor fields. It also examines the more general issues of visualizing a continuum volume field and animating the dimensions of time and motion in a state of behavior. The final section focuses on production visualization capabilities, including the practical computational aspects of visualization such as user interfaces, database architecture, and interaction with a model. The book concludes with an outline of successful practical applications of visualization, and future trends in scientific visualization.

This volume contains papers representing a comprehensive record of the contributions to the fifth workshop at EG '90 in Lausanne. The Eurographics hardware workshops have now become an established forum for the exchange of information about the latest developments in this field of growing importance. The first workshop took place during EG '86 in Lisbon. All participants considered this to be a very rewarding event to be repeated at future EG conferences. This view was reinforced at the EG '87 Hardware Workshop in Amsterdam and firmly established the need for such a colloquium in this specialist area within the annual EG conference. The third EG Hardware Workshop took place in Nice in 1988 and the fourth in Hamburg at EG '89. The first part of the book is devoted to rendering machines. The papers in this part address techniques for accelerating the rendering of images and efficient ways of improv ing their quality. The second part on ray tracing describes algorithms and architectures for producing photorealistic images, with emphasis on ways of reducing the time for this computationally intensive task. The third part on visualization systems covers a num ber of topics, including voxel-based systems, radiosity, animation and special rendering techniques. The contributions show that there is flourishing activity in the development of new algorithmic and architectural ideas and, in particular, in absorbing the impact of VLSI technology. The increasing diversity of applications encourage new solutions, and graphics hardware has become a research area of high activity and importance.

The latest developments in rendering, visualization, and rasterization hardware are reported in this volume, which contains revised versions of thecontributions to the Sixth Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware, held in Vienna in September 1991 in conjunction with the Eurographics '91 Conference. The book has five parts and a keynote paper, "Issues and Directions for Graphics Hardware Accelerators," by Kurt Akeley. The first part of the book concerns graphics hardware design, including simulation and silicon compilers. The second part contains two papers on graphics systems. The third part focuses on volume (voxel-based) machines, describing two devices to facilitate transformations of volumes. The fourth part includes papers on rasterization systems, including character rasterization and scan-conversion of triangular faces. The papers in the last part of the book focus on rendering machines. They include a programmable rendering engine, primitive shaders, and radiosity implementation on a parallel architecture.