Using Mesh Shaders for isosurface extraction

Abstract

This thesis investigates the use of the Mesh Shader graphics pipeline, utilising in particular its ability of parallel and dynamic choice of geometry, to gain computation efficiencies in realising the Marching Cubes isosurface extraction algorithm. The thesis details how the Marching Cubes algorithm was mapped to the Mesh Shader pipeline, to form a baseline implementation. In addition, two heuristic-based variants are presented that reduced the GPUs workload, but at the potential cost of compromising accuracy. In evaluation of the work, a comparison of the baseline Mesh Shader pipeline implementation is made with a previous compute-shader based implementation. We also present a set of experiments that investigate the speed and accuracy of the two heuristic-based variants.