Implementing volume rendering using 3D texture slicing
Volume rendering is a special class of rendering algorithms that allows us to portray fuzzy phenomena, such as smoke. There are numerous algorithms for volume rendering. To start our quest, we will focus on the simplest method called 3D texture slicing. This method approximates the volume-density function by slicing the dataset in front-to-back or back-to-front order and then blends the proxy slices using hardware-supported blending. Since it relies on the rasterization hardware, this method is very fast on the modern GPU.
The pseudo code for view-aligned 3D texture slicing is as follows:
Get the current view direction vector.
Calculate the min/max distance of unit cube vertices by doing a dot product of each unit cube vertex with the view direction vector.
Calculate all possible intersections parameter (λ) of the plane perpendicular to the view direction with all edges of the unit cube going from the nearest to farthest vertex, using min...
