Master Thesis: Real-time stream surface computation and rendering

Title: Real-time stream surface computation and rendering
Supervisor: Prof.Dr. Westermann
Advisors: Dr. Andreas Dietrich, Dr. Frank Michel
Abstract: Streamsurfaces are one of the powerful visualization tools, which are used to gain insight into characteristics and features of flow fields. In practice, stream surfaces are approximated by triangulating adjacent pairs of integral curves, originating from a seeding line. The generation of integral curves bears quite some similarities to ray tracing algorithms used in physically based renderers. Although, the techniques used in ray tracing may not have good performance in the streamline computation context due to their different computational nature, they can be optimized for streamline computation by introducing some modifications. In this master thesis, I present my work on accurate stream surface computation and rendering in real-time, by exploiting the scalability and portability features of parallel architectures in heterogeneous computing, and utilizing concepts from physically based rendering. To improve the efficiency, I use a scheduler to divide the stream surface computation and rendering tasks on different devices proportional to their computation powers. Additionally, I apply and evaluate different acceleration structures and the concepts of caching to improve the efficiency and utilization of stream surface generation on modern GPUs and CPUs to achieve real-time results. Furthermore, the possible impact of applying ray-packing and ray-sorting to the streamline computation is investigated.