Hello, I’m trying to understand if it’s feasible to use a metaballs-ish technique to allow the user to generate a 3d mesh. Similar to the Spore creature creator. As you add blobs together your model is rebuilt. Everything I’ve learned about metaballs so far is shader based, or a particle system using additive blending. Does anyone know of online explanations or previous experiments? Thanks for any pointers!
-=P=-
I don’t think Spore uses metaballs, But the basic idea is that you create a ‘field’ based on some geometry and then use a marching cubes algorithm to build a shell around the field.
You can think of the metaballs themselves as point electric charges with the electric charge falling off as you get farther away from the center. You can then use marching cubes to construct a mesh for all points where the charge equals a certain value. You can use multiple points, or even line segments and more complex shapes to create a complex charge field before skinning it with marching cubes.
I’ve written a marching cubes algorithm in Godot which you might find useful.
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Fantastic, thank you!