Marching cubes?

Question

I have an object made of points, lets say its point cloud, i want to render object from those points, i want object to look like those points were wrapped in a sheet of paper. I want to animate it, so first thing that came on my mind was marching cubes, but my object will not be a ball or cube, it will morph, is there any simpler approach than marching cubes?

Answer 1

Depending on what you mean by "wrapped" a 3D convex hull may produce the effect that you want.

Animate your vertices however you want and re-run the hull algorithm each time.

Answer 2

The Marching Cubes algorithm seems like the best fit to what you're looking for -- not all point clouds are convex. The algorithm may seem intimidating because of the large lookup table, but it is actually pretty straightforward. I have posted an example (using Three.js) at:

http://stemkoski.github.com/Three.js/Marching-Cubes.html

Answer 3

This seems like what you're looking for: http://nehe.gamedev.net/data/lessons/lesson.asp?lesson=25