The VolPack Volume Rendering Library
VolPack is a portable software library for volume rendering. Developed as part
of our volume rendering research project, it is
based on a new family of fast volume rendering algorithms (see Philippe Lacroute and
Marc Levoy , Fast Volume
Rendering Using a Shear-Warp Factorization of the Viewing
Transformation, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH94). The library comes with
vprender, a demonstration volume rendering application based on the Tcl
scripting language, the Tk widget set, and VolPack. The source code for
VolPack and vprender is available free of charge for non-commercial use. The
software was written by Philippe Lacroute.
Table of Contents
VolPack is a software library for fast, high-quality volume rendering.
The library has the following features:
- Renders data sampled on a regular, three-dimensional grid.
- Supports user-specified transfer functions for both opacity and
color.
- Provides a shading model with directional light sources, multiple
material types with different reflective properties, depth cueing,
and shadows.
- Produces color (24 bits/pixel) or grayscale (8 bits/pixel) renderings,
with or without an alpha channel.
- Supports arbitrary affine view transformations.
- Supports a flexible data format that allows an arbitrary C
structure to be associated with each voxel.
The library is intended for use in C or C++ programs but may be
useful with other programming languages.
The current implementation does not support perspective projections or
clipping planes. These features will be added in a future release.
The library does not use any specialized hardware and is
therefore portable to most platforms, yet it achieves very fast
rendering times. On an SGI Indigo workstation a 256^3 voxel volume
can be rendered in about one second.
The current release of VolPack is version 1.0beta3, which is a beta
release. There are several independent pieces of the release which
you can retrieve by clicking on the headings in the following list.
These items and some additional information are available by anonymous
ftp to graphics.stanford.edu in the directory pub/volpack .
-
VolPack (1024K bytes compressed)
- Compressed tar file containing source code for the library
routines. Save it as volpack-1.0b3.tar.Z and type "
zcat
volpack-1.0b3.tar.Z | tar xf -" to unpack the source (or if your Web
browser automatically decompresses files then use cat instead of
zcat). Look at the README file in the unpacked source for further
installation instructions.
-
vprender (245K bytes compressed)
- Compressed tar file containing source code for the vprender
application, a demonstration volume rendering program. Save it
as vprender-2.0b.tar.Z and type "
zcat vprender-2.0b.tar.Z | tar
xf -" to unpack the source (or if your Web browser automatically
decompresses files then use cat instead of
zcat). Then look at the
README file in the unpacked source for further installation
instructions. Vprender requires the VolPack library and the Tcl/Tk
command language libraries. The README file describes how to get
Tcl/Tk if you do not already have it.
If you decide to use the software then please add yourself to our
mailing list so we can tell you about bug fixes and new versions of
the software. Just send a message to:
majordomo@lists.stanford.edu
with the message body:
subscribe volpack-announce
VolPack User's Guide
For other information about VolPack or vprender, send email to:
volpack@graphics.stanford.edu
Last update: 4 January 1995
volpack@graphics.stanford.edu