1.2 KiB
Slush-pile from implicit rant
(TODO: This was shelved from another post. Do something with it.)
None of my attempts have ever quite worked as soon as I start
dealing with implicit surfaces that have much sharpness to
them… which isn't saying much, since I am not exactly world-class
at dealing with meshes and mesh topology directly, but it's also
legitimately a very hard problem. Even when I tried in CGAL, which
can handle implicit surfaces and does a far better job at generating
"good" meshes than anything I could hope to write myself, the
problem I ran into is that it was generating good meshes for
industrial CAD, not good meshes for rendering. That is, their
inaccuracy to the true surface was bounded, and I could always
reduce it by just using denser meshes. For CAD applications, this
seems fine. For rendering, though, I kept running into some major
inefficiencies in terms of number of triangles required (and as well
the amount of time required). I don't know much about the algorithms
they use, but I am fairly sure that for detail level N (inversely
proportional to minimum feature size) both triangle count, time, and
likely memory usage grow with O(N^3).
(TODO: Give an example of the above perhaps?)