First animation test with the Polygonise operator for ICE.

Here is the first animation test of my Polygonise operator (a C++ plugin for ICE particle clouds). I used a sample scene from the really promising ICE SPH Fluids from Thiago Costa and Grant Kot. I’m starting to work on the optimisation speed.

The major bottleneck is in the way you get values on the height points of each cubes in the 3D grid used for the marching cube algorithm. Those values are computed by a formula using  the distance between each cubes points and each ICE particles. For 30*30*30 cubes (27 000 points) and 1000 particles,  it starts to be a lot of processing.

The first optimisation I add today is a cutoff distance. The cubes points who are not in a bounding box around a particle, will not be evaluated. I put a user parameter to specifies the bounding box size of search around each particle. With this technique the meshing is much faster than before but certainly not production ready. On my old laptop with the Viscous_101 sample scene from Thiago, it takes 30 seconds to mesh 1000 particles… so I guess I need more optimisations work :p.

Anyway, I really want to push this project as far as I can.  See you soon !