MarchingCubes

Dynamic optimized mesh-generating Marching Cubes algorithm. The goal of this project is to be able to give MarchingCubes successive point clouds along with a transformation (in world space) and it will continually update the mesh in the quickest amount of time.

Requirements

PointCloud Library https://pointclouds.org
C++ 17

Building the Project

Use cmake to generate the project
Steps I took to build on my Windows machine:

> mkdir vcpkg
> cd vcpkg
> git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg
> .\vcpkg\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat

> .\vcpkg install pcl:x64-windows

/* This command is used so other projects can more easily find and link to VCPKG libraries */
> .\vcpkg integrate install
> cd..

/* Now create your MarchingCubes folder */
> mkdir MarchingCubes
> cd MarchingCubes
> git clone https://github.com/patrickabadi/MarchingCubes
> mkdir build
> cd build
> cmake .. "-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=D:\src\vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake"

Running the Project

Note: Debug timing will always be slower because of the debug iterator slowdowns

Note: The debug build will build but fail to run unless you copy libpng16.dll and zlib1.dll from ./MarchingCubes/build/bin/Release to ./MarchingCubes/build/bin/Debug

Run the app and on the visualization window rotate the scene until you see the model in front of you. Zoom in/out with the mouse wheel
Press spacebar to move to the next frame
Press 's' to end early

Algorithm explained

Incoming points are placed into a virtualized voxel grid. This saves on space and allows it to be updated on subsequent incoming points, without having to recreate the voxel grid.
Points added to each voxel grid now become vertices in a cube grid. Every added point in the voxel grid can affect up to 8 cubes in the cube grids so they need to be checked
Followed this example for efficient generation of triangle faces http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/