kyy13/mc-mesher

marching cubes mesh generator for c++, c#, and unity

mc-mesher

by Kyle J Burgess (github.com/kyy13)

Summary

mc-mesher is a lightweight marching cubes mesh generator for c, c++, c#, and Unity.

Features

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Mesh Generation

• Generate 3D Marching Cubes meshes from a 3D scalar field and custom ISO level.
• Produces mesh indices, vertices, and normal vector data
• Choose between face normal vectors, and vertex normal vectors.

Algorithms

• Trace rays through a scalar field used to generate a mesh without requiring the mesh to be generated first; detects collision with the mesh and returns the point of intersection. This method will detect collision much faster than ray tracing implementations operating on the mesh data itself.

Performance

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Notes

• mc-mesher is designed to produce indexed marching cubes meshes with minimal vertices.
• Meshes generated with face normals tend to be much larger due to the inability to index vertices that share the same position, because they have different normal vectors.
• Mesh generation functions have O(X*Y*Z) time complexity where X, Y, and Z refer to the dimensions of the scalar field used to produce the mesh.
• Meshes with face normals have O(1) temporary memory usage.
• Meshes with vertex normals have O(X*Y) temporary memory usage.

Quick Start

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Unity Steps

1. Download the latest release from the releases page.
2. Drop the DLL into the your Assets folder
3. Drop the mc_mesher.cs wrapper file into your Assets folder.

Build

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Notes

• There are precompiled binaries available on the releases page.
• See the build scripts in the scripts folder for examples on how to build with cmake.
  The scripts are setup to target mingw-w64 for 64-bit windows.

Requirements

1. A working c++17 (or higher) compiler.
2. CMake version 3.7 or higher

Steps

1. Run cmake with DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release to generate the build files
2. Run make to compile

mc-mesher uses lookup tables modified from the transvoxel algorithm [1].

[1] Lengyel, Eric. “Voxel-Based Terrain for Real-Time Virtual Simulations”. PhD diss., University of California at Davis, 2010.