Real-time particle isosurface extraction

Abstract

Particle-based methods are commonly used for simulation of fluid, gelatinous, and gooey substances. Recently, there has been great interest in using these methods in interactive applications such as surgical simulation, surface modeling, and video games. While modern computers are easily capable of simulating thousands of particles in real time, in many cases, a surface must be generated over the particles in order to realistically render the output of such a simulation. This surface extraction step is often the bottleneck in such applications due to the high computational cost and/or large memory requirements of common surface extraction algorithms. We present a new approach for fast, high quality polygonization of isosurfaces that can be used to render surfaces in real-time over thousands of particles in an unbounded spatial domain using a small amount of working memory, and compare it to existing algorithms. Furthermore, we extend our approach to generate polygon faces in back-to-front rendering order for transparent surfaces. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this new technique with several interactive scenarios showing complex interaction between fluid entities and dynamic objects in a virtual environment.