Adaptive Implicit Surface Polygonization Using Marching Triangles

Abstract

This paper presents several improvements to the marching triangles algorithm for general implicit surfaces. The original method generates equilateral triangles of constant size almost everywhere on the surface. We present several modifications to adapt the size of the triangles to the curvature of the surface. As cracks may arise in the resulting polygonization, we propose a specific crack-closing method invoked at the end of the mesh growing step. Eventually, we show that the marching triangles can be used as an incremental meshing technique in an interactive modeling environment. In contrast to existing incremental techniques based on spatial subdvision, no extra data-structure is needed to incrementally edit skeletal implicit surfaces, which saves both memory and computation time.