March 11, 2017

GPU Marching Cubes

A marching cubes demo based on GPU.

Code : Github

Date : Spring 2017

As mentioned before (Voxel Terrain), Marching Cubes is one of the isosurface extraction algorithm, which was first published in the 1987 Siggraph proceedings by Lorensen and Cline. The application of this algorithm is mainly concerned with medical visualizations such as CT and MRI scan data, and special effects or 3D modeling with what is usually called metaballs. The two-dimensional method is called the marching squares algorithm. Anstroneer also uses this method to accomplish their stylized terrain.

The procedural generation part is mainly based on Perlin Noise, which is saved and read from a 3d texture. The difference between this demo and Voxel Terrain is that this one is written in .fx shader file so that it’s much faster than the former one.

For accomplishing this, I practiced my DirectX programming for more than 1 month. By following the GPU Gems 3 Chapter 1, it finally worked.