A New Hybrid Approach to Non-Refractive Transparency in 3-D Graphics

Transparency is a useful feature in scientific visualization. Transparency can be implemented in either non-refractive or refractive form. Non-refractive transparency rendering is a fundamental issue for interactive visualization. Non-refractive transparency gives more insight of the interior structure of geometric models without the distortion from refraction. This paper firstly presents two major approaches for non-refractive transparency rendering i.e. Alpha-Blending and Screen-Door transparency. Both are widely used transparency techniques. Secondly, a new algorithm is proposed as Hybrid transparency technique to overcome limitations of Alpha-Blending and Screen- Door transparency. As one of the major goals in real-time computer graphics is to achieve sufficient realism of rendered images without compromising rendering speed too much, Hybrid transparency technique gives better visual quality than Screen-Door transparency and less time complexity than Alpha-Blending. The above said algorithms are implemented using widely available VC++ and OpenGL graphics library.