This paper presents a framework that fully leverages the advantages of a deferred rendering approach for the interactive visualization of large-scale datasets. Geometry buffers (G-Buffers) are generated and stored in situ, and shading is performed post hoc in an interactive image-based rendering front end. This decoupled framework has two major advantages. First, the G-Buffers only need to be computed and stored once---which corresponds to the most expensive part of the rendering pipeline. Second, the stored G-Buffers can later be consumed in an image-based rendering front end that enables users to interactively adjust various visualization parameters---such as the applied color map or the strength of ambient occlusion---where suitable choices are often not known a priori. This paper demonstrates the use of Cinema Darkroom on several real-world datasets, highlighting CD's ability to effectively decouple the complexity and size of the dataset from its visualization.
@article{arxiv.2010.03936,
title = {Cinema Darkroom: A Deferred Rendering Framework for Large-Scale Datasets},
author = {Jonas Lukasczyk and Christoph Garth and Matthew Larsen and Wito Engelke and Ingrid Hotz and David Rogers and James Ahrens and Ross Maciejewski},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.03936},
year = {2020}
}