Generating Smooth High-Quality Isosurfaces for Interactive Modeling and Visualization of Complex Terrains

Abstract

In modeling and rendering of complex procedural terrains the extraction of isosurfaces is an important part. In this paper we introduce an approach to generate high-quality isosurfaces from regular grids at interactive frame rates. The surface extraction is a variation of Dual Marching Cubes and designed as a set of well-balanced parallel computation kernels. In contrast to a straightforward parallelization we generate a quadrilateral mesh with full connectivity information and 1-ring vertex neighborhood. We use this information to smooth the extracted mesh and to approximate the smooth subdivision surface for detail tessellation. Both improve the visual fidelity when modeling procedural terrains interactively. Moreover, our extraction approach is generally applicable, for example in the field of volume visualization.