Hi Mathias,
> > Mmh...yes that's right. But how do f.e. computer games
> > manage this problem? There are lots of games in which
> > the player can move in a 3d environment with a really
> > good resolution. And this is even possible with not so
> > fast graphics cards.
>
> The details in those games do not come from volume-rendering, e.g.
> masses of polygons but from texture mapping, e.g. from bitmaps mapped to
> a relatively small number of polygons. Since modern graphics cards are
> optimized for texture mapping this method is relatively fast. Don't mix
> this up with the setTextureEnable() of visad since this is not "real"
> texture mapping. As far as I know visad does not support texture mapping
> in the original sense. Please correct me Bill if this is not right.
You are absolutely right that games do not do volume rendering,
and that they are fast because of texture mapping. But VisAD
also uses texture mapping, and in fact setTextureEnable() is used
to enable and disable it (the default is enabled, since it is such
a performance boost).
Cheers,
Bill
