Rune Skovbo JohansenJul 27, 2023

The Marching Cubes and Dual Contouring algorithms create meshes with triangles of very irregular sizes.

A "Compact Isocontours" technique by Moore and Warren in 1995 addressed this very nicely. The technique is described in Graphics Gems III and also here:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.49.5214&rep=rep1&type=pdf

This was used in Spore's creature creator, but I can't find any open source implementations of it, and Asset Store solutions like MudBun and Clayxels don't support it either. Am I missing something?

Show threadRune Skovbo JohansenJul 30, 2023

Success! I managed to implement the Vertex Displacement technique, here compared with regular Marching Cubes. It was not quite as complex as I had originally thought (one paper described the algorithm in simpler terms than the other).

I forked an existing Marching Cubes project for Unity on GitHub and added support for Mesh Displacement here:
https://github.com/runevision/Marching-Cubes-Mesh-Displacement/blob/master/Assets/MarchingCubes/Marching/CompactMarchingCubes.cs

Marching-Cubes-Mesh-Displacement/Assets/MarchingCubes/Marching/CompactMarchingCubes.cs at master · runevision/Marching-Cubes-Mesh-Displacement

Marching cubes with mesh displacement in Unity. Contribute to runevision/Marching-Cubes-Mesh-Displacement development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
Show threadDark Table  Jul 30, 2023
@runevision My recent obsession has been about quickly generating unique uv coords for a procedural mesh. Do you know any interesting techniques/implementations?
Show threadRune Skovbo Johansen
@drktbl For Spore they implemented a dumb but fast technique that would not work well if human artists needed to work with it, but was ok (if inefficient) when the UV mapping was only used by algorithms.
https://www.chrishecker.com/My_Liner_Notes_for_Spore
My Liner Notes for Spore - Chris Hecker's Website

Jul 30, 2023 at 3:02pmWeb
Show threadTrepanJul 30, 2023
@runevision Did you ever consider Surface Nets? In my game I found neither MC nor DC provided clean enough geometry for my purpose (collision meshes). SN meshes we’re the cleanest by far.
Show threadRune Skovbo JohansenJul 30, 2023
@Trepan I haven’t made any final decisions (just messing around for now, really) but thought Mesh Displacement seemed promising since Spore shipped using that to great success.
Show threadPatrick Curry (GameDev)Jul 30, 2023

@runevision @drktbl For my procedural / generated mesh experiments in Unity, I found this UVCalculator to be pretty useful:

https://answers.unity.com/questions/64410/generating-uvs-for-a-scripted-mesh.html

#gamedev #unity

Generating UVs for a scripted mesh

I generated a plane through script, now I need to generate UVs for it so it can render a texture on it. I having a difficult time understanding how to do this as im used to the visual tools I use in 3d packages. All I would like to do is stretch out the texture to be the size of my scripted plane. I used this example from the documentation, It allowed me to render a texture but not correctly (just a bunch of lines) I messed with some of its parameters and havnt had any luck. Vector3[...

Unity Discussions
Show threadRune Skovbo JohansenJul 30, 2023
@patrickmcurry @drktbl I think that code creates UV maps that are likely to have overlapping regions. A big problem for some use cases but not for others.
Show threadPatrick Curry (GameDev)Jul 30, 2023
@runevision @drktbl Ahh yes it would. I used it to quickly generate UVs for generated meshes -- but lots of texture tiling. Sorry I misunderstood the question.