Question on isosurface?

Hello,

it might sound kind of stupid, but I have some general questions about creating isosurfaces. I want to bring in surface rendering of binarized image stacks… that means I have microscopic aquired image slices which have been preprocessed.

  1. What do I have to do next? (actually after I loaded the image into a specific array)

  2. Do I have to extract surface points?

  3. What exactly do I have to feed the marching algorithm?

Sorry, that it might sound a little bit strange but I would appreciate any given help!!!

Thanks in advance

chris.

Hi,

You have two options, either you can make a 3d texture out of the data and use volumetric rendering, or you can extract the isosurfaces and render them normally. I guess you want to do the latter, so:

I guess you have already found some information on marching cubes/tethaedra/whatever algorithms. The algorithm will extract the points for you. You give it your image array and an isovalue, and the algorithm will create the surface for you. There are lots of sample implementations on the web, you should find some of them by a little searching.

Please note that the marching cubes algorithm is patented, so you might not be allowed to use it in a commercial product.

-Ilkka

Thx for your help.