Programmable MultiVolume Rendering Project

Key Investigators

Review the newly exposed GLSL hooks in VTK as a mechanism to add features to Slicer's Volume Rendering
Possible features to explore
- Optimized performance/quality for multiple overlapping volumes
- Custom clipping or other rendering features
- Adding nonlinear deformations

Review what's new since we discussed this last year
- New VTK version and classes
- New Slicer GUI
- Other GLSL examples that we can draw from
  - IBIS / PRISM
  - STEP
Document existing functionality in the VTK wiki on this page and identify potential builtin variables and functions that could be added to facilitate the creation of new volumetric effects.
Replicate the examples presented in the PRISM paper using the improved VTK mapper.
Replicate the US heart rendering of Philips machine with data from Matt Joley.

Provided a proof of concept (python script) for dynamic shader editing in Slicer (see image, video and link to script below)
Started documenting the new volume rendering functionality of VTK here
Suggested improvements:
- VTK: expose interface for setting custom uniform variables in vtkGPUOpenGLRaycastMapper
- Slicer: Build an interface to interactively edit shader code, visualize the complete shader and display shader compilation errors.