PPPL Tokamak Data
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The Princeton Physics laboratory wished to view their tokamak simulation data as a 3D volume. However, there were considerable challenges to overcome in order to render this data using direct volume rendering:
- Each time step was 2GB in size
- The data was not stored as a regular grid, but as a slices of a point cloud in the shape of a torus
- The torus was not a regular torus, but had varied in thickness around the center ring
- The points from one slice did not connect to the same points on the next slice
The data was resized to fit into video memory and several warp textures were used in order to model the deformations and changes in connectivity in the torus. This allowed for very fine smooth lines in the final renderings.