bsikora/blender-marching-cubes

a blender python script for creating a mesh approximating an isosurface of a scalar field

Marching Cubes for blender

This is an optimized version of Tom Sapiens' marching cubes implementation for blender. It is useful for fabricating a blender mesh approximating an isosurface of a scalar field function.

I found the original at http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?265240-Generation-of-Isosurfaces-skript-%28Marching-Cubes%29 and made

• some fixes to compensate for API drift
• minor stylistic changes
• and some significant performance improvements.

It is not (strictly speaking) an addon for blender. It is instead a python script which can be executed from blender's text editor to build a mesh for an isosurface of the field function defined inside the python script.

https://www.blender.org/manual/extensions/python/text_editor.html has a section explaining how to execute scripts from blender's text editor.

The script comes with a sample scalarfield function (embedded inside the main() function near the top of the file) you can test with, but you will want to replace this with your own scalarfield function. The most common problem I anticipate is picking p0, p1, or isolevel in such a way that nothing interesting happens in the analysis box (Imagine if you tried to compute the isosurface for a sphere of radius 4 but only used a box of radius 1).

Resolutions of 100x100x100 can be computed in a matter of seconds on modern hardware (depending on how complicated your field function is). Going up to 200x200x200 can easily push your compute times up to a minute on low-end hardware. Going higher than that is recommended only for the patient.

Performance may be improved over the original, but is still inferior to the cython port: https://github.com/Pyroevil/CubeSurfer/blob/master/README.md

Authors: Robert Forsman (API fixes and optimization) Tom Sapiens (blender python port) Paul Bourke (author of source article with C++ code examples)