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| Exploring Metaballs and Isosurfaces in 2D |
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Gaiiden GDNet Content Lead Member since: 8/30/2000 From: Lincroft, NJ, United States |
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 Posted - 9/3/2008 1:33:05 PM |
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| About the Author Stephen Whitmore is a Canadian student currently studying Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. His interests lie mostly in the areas of game development and graphics programming/theory. If you have any further questions about metaballs or isosurfaces, or any comments regarding the article, please don't hesitate to drop him an email at stephen.whitmore (at) gmail (dot) com; he'd love to hear from you. |
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Maddi Member since: 3/29/2005 From: Germany |
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 Posted - 9/4/2008 2:17:28 AM |
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| Good article, I always wondered about the mechanics behind Metaballs, now I understand. Couldn't resist, had to try it out with quartz / glsl: Glsl Metballs in 2D ( First post on the site ) |
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Aardvajk GDNet+ Member since: 3/3/2006 |
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 Posted - 9/4/2008 11:51:45 AM |
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| Great article. Read this months ago when Stephen posted it on his own blog. Nice to see it made it on to GDNet and got a featured article spot. |
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Trillian Member since: 4/28/2005 From: Montreal, Canada |
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Posted - 9/5/2008 6:45:44 AM |
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| Really interesting article. The approach to implementing those "meta-things" is orders of magnitude easier than I'd thought. It could have been nice to have a short concluding paragraph explaining how it's done in 3D (as I guess you dont apply a per-voxel algorithm). Anyways, that was a good reading! |
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swiftcoder Member since: 7/3/2003 From: Boston, MA, United States |
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Posted - 9/5/2008 4:58:24 PM |
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Quote:Unfortunately, you pretty much have to. You can speed things up a bit by using an octree to discard unused areas, but the algorithm does have to run per voxel, and since you need to extract a polygonal surface, it is a much more complicated and expensive algorithm. |
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HopeDagger GDNet+ Member since: 6/26/2004 From: Waterloo, Canada |
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Posted - 9/7/2008 10:20:50 AM |
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Thank you for all of the positive comments. I'm looking forward to pumping out some more articles in the (near!) future.  -- Gauntlets of Recursion (+3) - My game development journal. My Recent Projects: [Meteorites] [Gundown] [Magma Duel] [Admiral Overalls] [Membrane Massacre] Current project: ((Aphicore)) |
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haydxn Member since: 9/12/2006 From: Salford, United Kingdom |
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Posted - 9/11/2008 2:29:00 PM |
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| Utterly fascinating. I feel compelled to write my own crude implementation right now! |
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MrRowl Member since: 1/2/2004 From: Oxford, United Kingdom |
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Posted - 9/16/2008 11:43:22 AM |
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| The article is nice as far as it goes, but it's a shame that there's not even a mention of other rendering methods - in particular marching cubes (and the equivalent in 2D) - since in practice (I assume) per-pixel probing/raycasting on the CPU isn't sensible for real-time rendering. |
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HopeDagger GDNet+ Member since: 6/26/2004 From: Waterloo, Canada |
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Posted - 9/17/2008 3:07:54 PM |
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Quote: You are absolutely right -- there's a metric tonne of other methods that I didn't even touch. I decided ahead of time that I wanted to cover the naive-est approach to the problem and simply focus on applying some optimizations to it, rather than delve into other approaches like marching squares or using the GPU. It would be at least fair to mention these though, so I'll see about putting in some additional references pointing in the direction of some of these alternate routes. Thanks! -- Gauntlets of Recursion (+3) - My game development journal. My Recent Projects: [Meteorites] [Gundown] [Magma Duel] [Admiral Overalls] [Membrane Massacre] Current project: ((Aphicore)) |
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shawnre Member since: 7/28/2001 From: Elizabethtown, KY, United States |
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Posted - 9/17/2008 5:48:43 PM |
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| Very nice article. As was pointed out, it is terribly slow, but that's ok. I managed to get an example done in XNA in about 15 minutes using this article. Very well done sir! |
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ryt Member since: 9/3/2005 From: rijeka, Croatia |
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Posted - 10/2/2008 8:40:23 AM |
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| Great article, but wery hard to find. I would like to more articles like this, so I searched under programming graphics, special effects, general programming, but I cant find it. |
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