Fast Polygonization of Implicit Surfaces

Abstract

Our work is centered on the use of implicit surfaces in interactive applications (at least 10 frames per sec) running on high-end consumer architecture (modeling, simulation, deformable body animation, games). We focus on the Marching Cubes algorithm that we tried to implement in an optimized way. We restrict our work to blended iso-surfaces generated by skeletons, since this kind of implicit surfaces is the most handy to use for animations. Our implementation optimizations deal with the following features: simplifying the field function, accelerating its evaluation for each point (voxel-based technique), generating automatically the triangles for any case of the Marching Cubes. Another point we have considered concerns tesselation ambiguities often resulting in holes appearing in the sur-face. We have coded a library which is very easy to use and can be downloaded freely. All these optimizations allow us to sample implicit surfaces composed of 200 points in 45 ms on a 450 MHz Pentium II Xeon.