This project has been succeeded by BinaryMeshFitting

PushingVoxelsForward

Isosurface extraction using largely undiscovered techniques in C and OpenGL. Check out https://voxelspace.net/

Follow the video series on YouTube!

This project aims to provide massive level of detail in realtime for smooth isosurfaces or voxel surfaces. The idea is to use SnapMC on a tetrahedral hierarchy.

Building and Running

Only 64-bit building is supported on Windows using Visual Studio 2017, but with a little extra work it can be used to run on Linux and even 32-bit architectures. It uses the following external libraries:

• cglm
• glew
• glfw

Screenshots

Marching Cubes vs SnapMC Marching Cubes vs SnapMC on a tetrahedral hierarchy SnapMC showing level of detail 18 levels deep

Benchmarks on an FX-8350 (including all resets and OpenGL timings)

MC: Z Torus (256^3)

Running MC on chunk.
--dim: 255
--indexed: true
--pem: false
-Reset chunk...done (451 ms)
-Label grid...done (125 ms)
-Label edges...done (252 ms)
-Polygonize...done (189 ms)
-Create VAO...done (0 ms)
Complete in 1017 ms. 93416 verts, 186832 prims (0 snapped).

SnapMC: Z Torus (256^3)

Running MC on chunk.
--dim: 255
--indexed: true
--pem: true
-Reset chunk...done (458 ms)
-Label grid...done (171 ms)
-Label edges...Snapping vertices...done (387 ms)
-Polygonize...done (272 ms)
-Create VAO...done (0 ms)
Complete in 1288 ms. 93416 verts, 110808 prims (118112 snapped).

To-Do

• Indexed marching cubes
• SnapMC
• Tetrahedral hierarchy
• Sharp feature support
• Multithreaded extraction
• GPU offloading
• Realtime modification

References

• Lorensen, William E., and Harvey E. Cline. "Marching cubes: A high resolution 3D surface construction algorithm." In ACM siggraph computer graphics, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 163-169. ACM, 1987.
• Raman, Sundaresan, and Rephael Wenger. "Quality isosurface mesh generation using an extended marching cubes lookup table." In Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 791-798. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008.
• Gregorski, Benjamin, Mark Duchaineau, Peter Lindstrom, Valerio Pascucci, and Kenneth I. Joy. "Interactive view-dependent rendering of large isosurfaces." In Proceedings of the conference on Visualization'02, pp. 475-484. IEEE Computer Society, 2002.
• Scholz, Manuel, Jan Bender, and Carsten Dachsbacher. "Level of Detail for Real-Time Volumetric Terrain Rendering." In VMV, pp. 211-218. 2013.
• Scholz, Manuel, Jan Bender, and Carsten Dachsbacher. "Real‐Time Isosurface Extraction With View‐Dependent Level of Detail and Applications." In Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 103-115. 2015.