Anyone know how I might get hold of some volume texture datasets? I’m working on a very simple volume rendering test, and I need to find some datasets to experiment with. The caveat is that they need to be sequences of single images, as opposed to actual volumetric data files, and preferably of relatively high-resolution (256x256x256 slices, for example). I’m thinking medical datasets might be the way to go, but all the ones I can find seem to be in obscure file-formats, so I guess I might need some kind of conversion software to extract each volume slice as an individual image.
I’m limited to using sequenced of single images, rather than true volume data sets/3D textures though, which probably precludes a lot of volume-rendering techniques. What I’ve been doing is just a really basic texturing of a stack of billboards with consecutive slices.
So far, I’ve been generated non-realtime volume renderings by passing the results of tweaking a 3D texture fragment shader (a voronoi texture generator, in the this case) through a multi-frame buffer, then texturing the billboards with consecutive ‘slices’.
I’d like to try a similar technique with actual volumetric data sets though, and see what I can do with transfer functions and lookup tables to visualise the data in different ways.
