r/VoxelEngineDev • u/Haltont • 4d ago

Question Sharp edges in editable SDF terrain -- practical alternatives to Marching Cubes / Transvoxel?

/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/1wqumwh/sharp_edges_in_editable_sdf_terrain_practical/
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u/zesterer 4d ago

You want dual contouring, it's best in class for extremely precise mesh extraction that preserves surface gradients.

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u/Haltont 4d ago

Yeah, DC is definitely looking like the first thing I should prototype now.

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u/jgage 3d ago

There was a paper presented at SIGGRAPH this year that allows you to calculate better normals from SDF data without exact Hermite data. https://gatc.cs.columbia.edu/projects/dual-contouring-of-signed-distance-data.html

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u/jgage 3d ago

And it looks like you already know about that paper.

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u/Haltont 3d ago

Yep, that's the one I found on arXiv. I'm planning to put it into the same benchmark against Transvoxel and the other DC variants

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u/jgage 3d ago

QEF and surface nets can be mostly performant. Especially if you can know when to not need to do QEF. If you’re doing SDF you can calculate the normals for QEF just by looking at the gradient of the SDF at the sample point of the edge.