Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2609.36898

Volcanite: Commodity-Hardware Segmentation Volume Visualization for Connectomics and Beyond

Max Piochowiak·Reiner Dolp·Julian Herold·Eric Behle·Carsten Dachsbacher·Alexander Schug
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Modern imaging produces terabyte-scale segmentation volumes, assigning each voxel an object label. These categorical, boundary-sensitive and label-rich data underpin connectomics and other imaging-driven fields, yet their scale often forces interpretation through slices, approximate meshes or distributed workflows that obscure spatial context and voxel-level defects. Here we show that such volumes can be explored directly on commodity hardware with Volcanite, an open-source framework for dense-segmentation rendering. Combining compression-aware data handling, a Vulkan GPU backend and segmentation-specific rendering, Volcanite enables low-latency exploration without meshing or distributed infrastructure, including for unpublished, sensitive or proprietary data. Across multi-domain datasets, it preserves voxel labels, adds shadows and global illumination, and renders up to half a trillion voxels at 100 frames per second. By replacing lengthy preprocessing with direct inspection, Volcanite decouples hypothesis generation from data preparation and turns teravoxel label fields into interactive evidence for discovery, validation and cross-domain spatial analysis

Explore related subjects

cs.GRq-bio.NCq-bio.QM

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Max Piochowiak, Reiner Dolp, Julian Herold, Eric Behle, Carsten Dachsbacher, Alexander Schug. 2026-09-29. Volcanite: Commodity-Hardware Segmentation Volume Visualization for Connectomics and Beyond. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36898

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

RLMuscle: Muscle-Driven Character Animation via Reinforcement Learning

Body deformation caused by muscle contraction plays a vital role in the visual realism of character animation, yet in most 3D animation pipelines artists have to manually specify muscle activations, which is time-consuming and gives no guarantee of physical realism. To address this, we propose a new method in which a reinforcement learning (RL) controller discovers per-muscle activations that track reference motions without manual tuning. Existing RL muscle controllers stop at 1D muscles; we go one step further, keeping the 1D model inside the RL control loop as a fast surrogate, and using a 3D volumetric simulation to produce the final deformation. Because both stages share the very same constitutive law, the muscle deformation is produced by the same activations that generated the motion. We further add a measured electromyography (EMG) prior that steers the redundant activation solution toward real human muscle recruitment. To achieve stable, efficient, and realistic simulation, we propose a novel geometric multigrid for Extended Position-Based Dynamics (XPBD) that is built on a coarse tetrahedral cage with barycentric-coordinate prolongation and closes a V-cycle on tetrahedral meshes. Within this GPU-parallelized solver, we inject the same Hill-type force-length law as an energy-based fiber constraint that turns per-fiber activation into realistic muscle contraction and bulging. We demonstrate volumetric muscle simulation on a 194-muscle human body with a diverse set of motions (walk, kick, swim, overhead-squat, etc.), simulating the full-body model at 18 ms per frame on a single RTX 4090. Our work takes a step toward character animation that is not only visually convincing but also biomechanically grounded. The website with code and videos is at https://chunleili.github.io/project-page-rlmuscle/.

cs.GR↗
arXiv2026

GALA: Geometry-Aware Language Model for Controllable Object Arrangement

Reasoning about fine-grained placement constraints, such as support and containment, is essential for realistic 3D scene creation. It remains a significant challenge for existing methods that rely on simplified object representations like oriented bounding box (OBB), which are blind to the detailed geometry. To address this limitation, we introduce GALA, a geometry-aware language model with explicit point cloud perception for controllable object placement. Our model performs autoregressively by predicting the 6D pose of one target object at a time conditioned on the scene context and placement instruction. We utilize a two-stage training strategy: the first stage aligns geometric and textual modalities through pretraining tasks, and the second stage fine-tunes the model for placement. To facilitate this task, we also curate a multi-source scene dataset covering diverse room types and fine-grained furniture arrangements, which will be open-sourced for community benefit. Experiments on our benchmark show our model significantly outperforms baselines without explicit geometric reasoning. We further develop a multi-stage plan-place-verify agent pipeline that uses the model for text-driven scene generation. Project Page: https://xccelephant.github.io/paper/gala/

cs.GR↗
arXiv2026

Quantized High-Performance High-Order Moment-Encoded LBM

Lattice Boltzmann methods (LBM) are widely used for visually rich fluid simulation, but their high memory bandwidth and storage requirements limit GPU performance and scalability, especially when coupled with complex geometry. Recent high-order moment-encoded LBM (HOME-LBM) reduces memory cost by storing compact velocity moments and performing collision directly in moment space, but its tightly coupled boundary treatment introduces divergent control flow. We present a high-performance, quantized HOME-LBM framework for large-scale turbulent fluid-solid simulations on a single GPU. Our geometry-decoupled computation scheme separates the regular fluid update from a sparse solid-correction stage, isolating geometry-dependent computations to improve GPU efficiency. To further reduce storage and memory traffic, we develop a reduced-precision representation for HOME-LBM by combining von Neumann stability analysis, empirical moment-range estimation, and runtime decomposition of second-order moments to control quantization error. We evaluate our approach on real-time demonstrations and large-scale examples using both D3Q19 and D3Q27 lattices, with additional 2D and 3D numerical experiments assessing accuracy and stability. Across the tested benchmarks, our framework substantially accelerates the original FP32 HOME-LBM implementation, with a maximum speedup of 32.5x on the Hilbert-curve geometry. Moment storage is reduced by 50% in fluid-only simulations and 25% in fluid-solid coupling examples, while maintaining numerical stability, fidelity, and high visual quality. In the static delta-wing benchmark, our solver achieves a 5.2x speedup over Leapfrog Flow Maps (LFM) under the tested configuration.

cs.GR↗