Fine-Scale Editing of Continuous Volumes using Adaptive Surfaces

Many fields of science such as astronomy and astrophysics require the visualization and editing of smooth, continuous volume data. However, current high-level approaches to volume editing concentrate on segmentable volume data prevalent in medical or engineering contexts, and therefore rely on the presence of well-defined 3D surface layers. Editing arbitrary volumes, on the other hand, is currently only possible using low-level approaches based on the rather unintuitive direct manipulation of axis-aligned slices. In this paper, we present a technique to add or modify fine-scale structures within astronomical nebulae based on adaptive drawing surfaces that enable 2D-image-like editing approaches. Our results look more natural and have been produced in a much shorter time than previously possible with axis-aligned slice editing.