Real-Time Marching Cubes on the Vertex Shader

Abstract

In this paper we propose a new approach for visualizing volumetric datasets by their isosurfaces. For an interactive isosurface reconstruction an optimized version of the well-known marching cubes algorithm is used. We extend the original algorithm by an additional vertex shader program. Contrary to other hardware-accelerated solutions our program is not based on a tetrahedral algorithm and thus the implementation for structured grids is more effective. Furthermore, surfaces of time-varying datasets at distinguished threshold values can be extracted in real-time.