Carlos A. Dietrich, Carlos Scheidegger, John Schreiner, Joao L. D. Comba, Luciana Nedel, Claudio Silva. IEEE TVCG, 15(1):150–159, 2009.
Marching Cubes is a popular choice for isosurface extraction from regular grids due to its simplicity, robustness, and efficiency. One of the key shortcomings of this approach is the quality of the resulting meshes, which tend to have many poorly shaped and degenerate triangles. This issue is often addressed through post processing operations such as smoothing. Rather than modifying the resulting mesh, we propose a method to modify the grid on which Marching Cubes operates. This modification greatly increases the quality of the extracted mesh. Our method incurs minimal computational overhead, can be readily integrated in existing Marching Cubes implementations, and is orthogonal to many Marching Cubes enhancements (particularly, performance enhancements such as out-of-core and acceleration structures).
Get the PDF version of the paper (30MB).
The source code is also available.