Abstract: A method to extract and visualize shock waves in 3-D explosion fields was proposed in this paper. In this method, a pressure field in the 3-D explosion field was firstly changed into the gradient field; the gradient field was then visualized by the volume rendering; and finally the transfer function for air medium was properly set to highlight shock waves. To improve the efficiency of visualization of the method, several techniques, including the lookup table and the bounding box, were used to accelerate the ray casting involved in the volume rendering. Visualized results obtained from numerical examples prove that the proposed method can expose the shock waves in 3-D explosion fields clearly.