Cubical marching squares

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A brief update on one particular thing cooking in my laboratory at the moment…

I’m taking a break from offline 3D-graphics (my path-tracer BeamRacer) to implement my own version of cubical marching squares (aka: CMS) for a stand-alone visualization library, which has to be named still. The versions of marching-somethings I’ve seen outside of academic-paper implementations – in commercial applications in particular – are not very pleasant to look at.

Only the games-industry manages to produce clean and elegant visuals, but lacks data-visualization details and precision on the other hand side. I intend to merge these seemingly mutual exclusive aspects.

In the example screenshot, you can see above, I’m feeding my implementation of CMS 3D-perlin-noise of different frequencies. It’s not handling all classification-cases yet and lacks the tessellation among other things, but it’s progressing nicely. Gradients (thus normals) and per-pixel shading are already in place.

Finally a bit of moving eye-candy…