Hardware accelerated voxelization

This paper presents a hardware accelerated approach to the voxelization of a wide range of 3D objects, including curves/surfaces, solids, and volumetric CSG models. It allows 3D scenes to be modeled and manipulated in their own representations, and generates the volume representations of regions of interest on-the-fly for volumetric operations. The algorithms take advantages of graphics hardware features in modern graphics workstations, such as texture mapping and frame buffer blending functions, to generate slices of the volume representations for various 3D models. As a result, we are able to perform interactive object manipulations and Boolean operations in an intermixed environment of geometric and volumetric objects under a unified volume graphics framework. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.