and marching cubes. It retains a dual vertex within the voxel but no longer at the center. Dual contouring leverages the position and normal of where the surface crosses the edges of a voxel to interpolate the position of the dual vertex within the voxel. This has the benefit of retaining sharp or smooth surfaces where surface nets often look blocky or incorrectly beveled. Dual contouring often uses surface generation that leverages octrees as an optimization to adapt the number of triangles in output to the complexity of the surface. Manifold dual contouring Manifold dual contouring includes an analysis of the octree neighborhood to maintain continuity of the manifold surface Examples Examples of isosurfaces are 'Metaballs' or 'blobby objects' used in 3D visualisation. A more general way to construct an isosurface is to use the function representation. See also Isopotential Triangulation (geometry) Implicit surface Volume rendering References External links Isosurface Polygonization The contourist package for numeric python generates triangulations of isosurfaces for arbitrary 3 dimensional functions which can be displayed using HTML5 as illustrated in this jsfiddle 3D computer graphics Medical imaging Surfaces