Rendering with Marching Cubes, looking at Hybrid Solutions

Abstract: Marching Cubes is a rendering technique that has many advantages for a lot of areas. It is a technique for representing scalar fields as a three-dimensional mesh. It is used for geographical applications as well as scientific ones, mainly in the medical industry to visually render medical data of the human body. But it's also an interesting technique to explore for the usage in computer games or other real-time applications since it can create some really interesting rendering. The main focus in this paper is to present a novel hybrid solution using marching cubes and heightmaps to render terrain; moreover, to find if it’s suitable for real-time applications. The paper will follow a theoretical approach as well as an implementational one on the hybrid solution. The results across several tests for different scenarios show that the hybrid solution works well for today's real-time applications using a modern graphics card and CPU (Central Processing Unit).