OpenGL – Build high performance graphics

Implementing volume rendering using splatting

In this recipe, we will implement splatting on the GPU. The splatting algorithm converts the voxel representation into splats by convolving them with a Gaussian kernel. The Gaussian smoothing kernel reduces high frequencies and smoothes out edges giving a smoothed rendered output.

Getting ready

The code for this recipe is in the Chapter7/Splatting directory.

How to do it…

Let us start this recipe by following these simple steps:

1. Load the 3D volume data and store it into an array.

   std::ifstream infile(filename.c_str(), std::ios_base::binary); if(infile.good()) { pVolume = new GLubyte[XDIM*YDIM*ZDIM]; infile.read(reinterpret_cast<char*>(pVolume), XDIM*YDIM*ZDIM*sizeof(GLubyte)); infile.close(); return true; ...