What is the best way to compile and visualize the code to get the images on the paper attached?

[uljad]

I love your work and the code is very self-documenting. What do you suggest is the best way to get an output like the 3D images attached to the paper?

[christopherbatty]

Thanks! The code contains a little barebones old opengl viewer app you could use to visualize the particles, mostly just for debugging purposes. For nice quality renders, probably you'll need to write some code yourself to dump the particles out into a format that is convenient for rendering in a proper piece of rendering software. For example, if you were using Houdini or Maya for modeling and rendering, you would want to figure out what file format(s) they accept for particle data, modify the code to output the particles in such a format, load them in, and go from there.

[uljad]

Could you please help me generate a mesh and using marching cubes and level set method? Also, the particle generation part is a little slow, do you suggest any other way of going about making it faster? How can I generate the mesh given just the particles from your code? Thank you

[christopherbatty]

1. No, I can't help you with that.
2. I suppose you could parallelize the particle generation.
3. Construct an implicit surface from the particles (e.g., blobbies or union of spheres or Zhu/Bridson '05, etc.) and then use a standard marching cubes algorithm to extract a mesh of it. You can either do this yourself, or e.g. Houdini has tools to do so.