
Bill Lorensen, co-creator of Marching Cubes, has died - mhalle
https://discourse.vtk.org/t/bill-lorensen/2288
======
lloeki
NVidia has this great article on marching cubes to generate complex procedural
terrain.

It really drives the point home on how simple (which doesn’t mean easy!) it
can be, and was a a-ha moment for me about GPU streaming design, the power of
shaders for procedural generation, and the connection with signal processing.

[https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch01....](https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch01.html)

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gilbetron
AKA my first experience with patent law. Marching cubes is an incredibly
obvious algorithm, and the owners of the patent for it sued people gleefully
in my experience. I talked to numerous game and simulation developers at the
time and the story was the same: a need to convert volumetric data into a 3D
surface, coming up with the obvious approach, get a nasty letter that it was
patented.

Very happy when the patent expired.

Condolences to his family, though. He sounds like he was actually a good guy.

~~~
tgb
There's also Marching Tetrahedra which wasn't covered by the marching cubes
patent and was kindly allowed to be used freely (and had some small
improvements). [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_tetrahedra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_tetrahedra)

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ohadpr
"Marching Cubes remains the most widely cited visualization algorithm ever".

It's an awesome algorithm that takes an isosurface (imagine a 3D map of
weights) and generates a polygonal mesh. This algo was heavily used in the
demoscene and often referred to as 'meta balls'.

Video of animated isosurface rendered with marching cubes:
[https://youtu.be/PbH1TlnDYvo](https://youtu.be/PbH1TlnDYvo)

~~~
mbel
> This algo was heavily used in the demoscene and often referred to as 'meta
> balls'.

No. It is used to implement 'meta balls' effect sometimes. But the two terms
are not synonymous. From my experience it's more common to see meta balls
implemented with raytracing or some screen-space techniques.

~~~
faceplanted
The guy wasn't wrong, "A is often referred to as B", doesn't contradict "B
isn't synonymous with A"

~~~
jacobolus
“Gears are often referred to as ‘pocket watches’” is not a correct statement,
even though gears are sometimes used in the implementation of pocket watches.

Cf.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaballs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaballs)

~~~
faceplanted
But they _are_ sometimes referred to as metaballs, _at the same time_ as being
used to implement them.

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wnkrshm
The Marching Cubes triangle lookup table is a 3D Wang-tileset for corner
connections, reduced for symmetries. Here is a 2D example of a Wang tileset
[0].

[0]
[http://www.cr31.co.uk/stagecast/wang/2corn.html](http://www.cr31.co.uk/stagecast/wang/2corn.html)

Edit: the defining quality of a Wang tileset is that it can tesselate a grid
of N different colors with square tiles. Usually there are only two colors
(with Marching Cubes inside and outside) because the number of tiles needed
grows fast with N.

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scottlegrand2
My dad spent his entire career at GE research. One day he arranged for Bill
Lorensen to give me a tour of their computer graphics lab. Great guy! Sad to
hear that he has passed.

------
corysama
[https://web.archive.org/web/20191217050317/https://discourse...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191217050317/https://discourse.vtk.org/t/bill-
lorensen/2288)

------
Fellshard
Used this algorithm in a capstone for my Bachelor's. Had a blast tuning and
tweaking it to work in my very raw OpenGL application.

May he rest in peace. I'm glad I've had the opportunity to peek inside his
mind in some small way.

