August 2007
Intermediate to advanced
1008 pages
21h 13m
English
Kees van Kooten Playlogic Game Factory
Gino van den Bergen Playlogic Game Factory
Alex Telea Eindhoven University of Technology
In this chapter we present a technique for rendering metaballs on state-of-the-art graphics processors at interactive rates. Instead of employing the marching cubes algorithm to generate a list of polygons, our method samples the metaballs’ implicit surface by constraining free-moving particles to this surface. Our goal is to visualize the metaballs as a smooth surface by rendering thousands of particles, with each particle covering a tiny surface area. To successfully apply this point-based technique on a GPU, we solve three basic problems. First, we need to evaluate ...