USING MARCHING CUBES ON SMALL MACHINES

A simple technique to visualize the isosurfaces extracted from a cell- based volumetric dataset using the Marching Cubes algorithm is propose d. The technique exploits the intrinsic ordering of the triangles prod uced by the surface extraction algorithm by adopting a Back-to-Front v isualization technique. The use of the technique together with the ado ption of a simple shading algorithm permits the rendering of high reso lution volumetric datasets in computational environments with limited capabilities in terms of memory and graphics hardware. (C) 1994 Academ ic Press, Inc.