Fast Voxelization of Three-Dimensional Synthetic Objects

This paper presents a new approach to the voxelization of threedimensional synthetic objects. It makes use of existing graphics hardware on standard graphics workstations, such as the polygon-based geometry engine and frame buffer operations, and is able to generate the voxel-based volume representations of general curves, surfaces, or solid objects efficiently. On a workstation with hardwaresupported texture mapping, the voxelization result may also be written directly to the three-dimensional texture memory as a three-dimensional texture object, and interactively rendered by the three-dimensional texture-mapping hardware. This approach provides a practical solution to the interactive manipulations of geometric objects within a volume graphics framework.