Adaptive Treelet Meshes for Efficient Streak-Surface Visualization on the GPU

Abstract

We describe a novel adaptive mesh representation for streak-surfaces. The surface is represented as a mesh of small trees of initial depth zero (treelets). This mesh representation allows for efficient integration, refinement, coarsening and appending of surface patches utilizing the computational capacities of modern GPUs. Integration, refinement, and rendering are strictly separated into effectively parallelizable substeps of the streak-surface integration algorithm. We also describe a sampler framework which unifies the handling of different vector field representations.