Hounsfield Units are calibrated to water ie water = 0 and should not be confused with the attenuation coefficients which are a function of the machine, whatever filters you are using & the materials being scanned.
HU are usually stored as signed integers so are rounded to the nearest number.
The volumetric rendering is done based on HUs. So data collected by the scanner is converted to integers and then the images are reconstructed. For display purposes its the HUs that are rescaled depending on the scanner either 0 to 65535 (for 16 bit) or 0 to 2147483647 (for 32 bit). Where 0 is air.
This seems an odd question for Stackoverflow.