Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By : Muhammad Mobeen Movania
Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By: Muhammad Mobeen Movania

Overview of this book

OpenGL is the leading cross-language, multi-platform API used by masses of modern games and applications in a vast array of different sectors. Developing graphics with OpenGL lets you harness the increasing power of GPUs and really take your visuals to the next level. OpenGL Development Cookbook is your guide to graphical programming techniques to implement 3D mesh formats and skeletal animation to learn and understand OpenGL. OpenGL Development Cookbook introduces you to the modern OpenGL. Beginning with vertex-based deformations, common mesh formats, and skeletal animation with GPU skinning, and going on to demonstrate different shader stages in the graphics pipeline. OpenGL Development Cookbook focuses on providing you with practical examples on complex topics, such as variance shadow mapping, GPU-based paths, and ray tracing. By the end you will be familiar with the latest advanced GPU-based volume rendering techniques.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
OpenGL Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Implementing polygonal isosurface extraction using the Marching Tetrahedra algorithm


In the Implementing pseudo-isosurface rendering in single-pass GPU ray casting recipe, we implemented pseudo-isosurface rendering in single-pass GPU ray casting. However, these isosurfaces are not composed of triangles; so it is not possible for us to uniquely address individual isosurface regions easily to mark different areas in the volume dataset. This can be achieved by doing an isosurface extraction process for a specific isovalue by traversing the entire volume dataset. This method is known as the Marching Tetrahedra (MT) algorithm. This algorithm traverses the whole volume dataset and tries to fit a specific polygon based on the intersection criterion. This process is repeated for the whole volume and finally, we obtain the polygonal mesh from the volume dataset.

Getting ready

The code for this recipe is in the Chapter7/MarchingTetrahedra directory. For convenience, we will wrap the Marching Tetrahedra...