Monday, October 3, 2011

Reading: (Spatial Vis) Marching cubes: A high resolution 3D surface construction algorithm

The overall steps for the algorithm match roughly the steps mentioned in the survey of algorithms paper, which is encouraging.

Of some note, I've written an implementation of marching squares before, so I assume marching cubes is similar, but in 3 dimensions. It looks like there are quite a few more complications though, especially the different surface to cube intersection triangulations. It is good that author mentions algorithm enhancements, though. The enhancement seems to bear some small resemblance to Cohen-Sutherland clipping, but I don't think that's really fair to say. Nevertheless, it is good seeing the discussion about the actual data throughout, or what used to be data.

I would love to see how this algorithm applies to any new data collection methods, although I realize that it shouldn't change too much. I'm sure there are new ways to cleanse the data to make it better for marching cubes, or some other algorithm, and further enhancements are possible. This is still a good paper, though, as it seems to get the gist of the algorithm, plus a few enhancements, as well.

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