| Submitted by , posted on 05 November 2000 |

Image Description, by This is my first attempt at Metaballs. The polygon generation code is _evil_. Fast, but evil. The rendering logic in this version was supposed to be faster, but isn't. That's the last time I take advice instead of just winging it (:
This demo ran at ~30 FPS on an P500 / 256MB RAM / GeForce SDR / Win2K (sp1). I've seen it go as high as 200 FPS.
Features:

> - OGL rendering.
> - Keyboard/mouse controls.
> - User controlled camera movement.
> - Dynamic LOD
> - Wireframe, textured rendering.
> - Special "data visualization" rendering.
> - Surface polygon generation using a version of Marching Cubes. (I implemented this + some hashing and it still ran slower than the naive brute force, no culling, switch-with-256-cases method.)

Future plans:

> - Multitexturing w/ alpha channeling for a completely unique surface texture.
> - "SurfCam" which moves as if walking on the surface of the metaball.
> - VSD and collision detection using octtrees.
> - Many-threaded version for multiprocessor machines?
> - Incorporation with my cloth, sky box/sky sphere and particle system demos to make something _really_ nice.

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