How Computers Draw Weird Shapes (Marching Squares)
In this video, we start with an interesting animation of blobby objects which we introduce as metaballs. There's a lot of surprisingly intricate ideas behind making these objects render on a screen. We'll see how folks in computer graphics attempted to solve this problem through a really elegant algorithm called marching squares. Marching squares is a really powerful algorithm that allows you to render any implicit function. But what's even more impressive in my opinion is the many clever shifts in perspective that allowed a vague problems such as this one to be transformed into a clear, well-defined, and solvable problem.
0:00 Introduction
3:29 Circles and Ellipses
4:57 Defining the Problem
6:00 A Guessing Game
8:29 Contours around Two Points
10:35 Sampling The Space
12:32 Breaking Down Cases
15:00 A Clever Optimization
17:20 How Marching Squares Works
18:59 Parallel Marching Squares
20:21 How Do Metaballs Work?
24:59 Marching Cubes
25:58 Some Parting Thoughts
References/Additional Resources:
http://jamie-wong.com/2014/08/19/meta... - the initial inspiration for the framework of this video, great introduction to metaballs and how they can be rendered using marching squares.
http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/BLOBS/... - great resource on implementing metaballs and some of the physics inspirations behind implicit functions
Original Marching cubes paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
Sebastian Lague Video on Marching Cubes:
• Coding Adventure: Marching Cubes
Further reading on polynomial approximations of metaball implicit functions:
https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
Implementation Help for Marching Cubes
http://paulbourke.net/geometry/implic...
Excellent lecture by Casey Muratori about Marching Cubes: • "Papers I Have Loved" by Casey Muratori
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/phy... - some of the physics behind equipotential lines in electric fields
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This video wouldn't be possible without the open source library manim created by 3blue1brown and maintained by Manim Community.
The Manim Community Developers. (2021). Manim – Mathematical Animation Framework (Version v0.11.0) [Computer software]. https://www.manim.community/
Here is link to the repository that contains the code used to generate the animations in this video: https://github.com/nipunramk/Reducible
All music in the video is from Aakash Gandhi
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