VolPack

VolPack is a portable software library for volume rendering. 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, Proc. SIGGRAPH '94, pp. 451-458).

Here is a brief list of 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, and depth cueing.
Produces color (24 bits/pixel) or grayscale (8 bits/pixel) renderings.
Supports arbitrary affine view transformations.
Supports a flexible data format that allows an arbitrary C structure to be associated with each grid point.
Achieves very fast rendering times without specialized hardware.

To give an idea of the performance of the library, a 256 by 256 by 256 voxel volume can be rendered in roughly one second on an SGI Indigo R4000, running entirely in software.

The VolPack distribution includes source code, a tutorial user's manual, man pages for all library routines, and some sample programs with one sample dataset. A simple Tcl/Tk application based on VolPack is also available.

Platforms: any UNIX workstation (tested on SGI, DEC Ultrix, Sun, HP)
Contact: volpack@graphics.stanford.edu
WWW Server: http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/software/volpack
FTP: graphics.stanford.edu /pub/volpack