Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Watertight And 2-Manifold Surface Meshes Using Dual Contouring With Tetrahedral Decomposition Of Grid Cubes, Tanweer Rashid, Sharmin Sultana, Michel A. Audette

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

The Dual Contouring algorithm (DC) is a grid-based process used to generate surface meshes from volumetric data. The advantage of DC is that it can reproduce sharp features by inserting vertices anywhere inside the grid cube, as opposed to the Marching Cubes (MC) algorithm that can insert vertices only on the grid edges. However, DC is unable to guarantee 2-manifold and watertight meshes due to the fact that it produces only one vertex for each grid cube. We present a modified Dual Contouring algorithm that is capable of overcoming this limitation. Our method decomposes an ambiguous grid cube into a …