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I have been reading various sources the past hours and couldn't understand how Dual Contouring works. My problem is that I don't know the meaning of "Hermite Data" and even Google and Wikipedia couldn't help me on that. Could someone explain me what "Hermite Data" is? Also I found this which says the important steps are described in 2.2. Sadly I don't quite understand the meaning of it. Because nowhere I could find a description what the (minimizer of the) quadratic function of this equation means:

E[x] = ∑ i (ni ·(x− pi ))2

I don't know what to "input" in this function nor what it "outputs". Also they are talking about "cubes" but as far as I know a set of Voxels is just a quantity of data(0 or 1) and far as I have understand Dual Contouring takes those Voxels and turns them into a mesh.

QuesterDesura
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1 Answers1

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In that context Hermite data is:

  • Per each vertex:
  • Sign (inside or outside of material) or material index
  • Per each edge:
  • Intersection point of edge and surface (can be stored as single float)
  • Surface normal at intersection point

There is good explanation at https://web.archive.org/web/20160305101254/https://upvoid.com/devblog/2013/05/terrain-engine-part-1-dual-contouring/ and in paper https://web.archive.org/web/20170713094715if_/http://www.frankpetterson.com/publications/dualcontour/dualcontour.pdf

Somnium
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  • This gave me a good understanding of what Hermite Data is and how Dual Contouring works, thanks for you answer, even though I posted this question quite a while ago. I might actually try to do a implementation of this. – QuesterDesura Mar 22 '18 at 08:52
  • @CLOVIS Changed to archived version. – Somnium Aug 24 '20 at 11:21