Real-Time Metaball Ray Casting with Fragment Lists

Abstract

In this paper we describe a method for rendering particle-based medium representations. The algorithm builds per-pixel lists of relevant metaballs, then incrementally constructs a piecewise polynomial approximation of summed metaball densities along rays, and finds intersections with the isosurface using those. This new approach scales well for a high number of particles, it can handle local extremities of depth complexity robustly, and it does not suffer from the inaccuracies and limitations of screen-space filtering approximation methods.