   Metaballs...?
  hey ive been tryin to figure out how to implement metaballs for a while now so does anyone know any sites with good tutorials or w/e on programming them??? 
  They''re a pretty advanced topic. You sure you''re ready for them?Metaballs/Blobby Objects overviewThere are basically two steps to working with metaballs: defining the density field, and mapping the isosurface.Assume a function, f(x,y,z), that takes the coordinates of a point in space and returns a one-dimensional value. The function could be anything - for example, it could calculate the distance from the (x,y,z) you pass in to a fixed point.Mapping the isosurface is the process of taking that function, and ''joining up'' all the points with the same value. So, if the function were ''distance from point P'' and you connected all positions with a value of 1.0, then you''d end up with a sphere of radius 1.0, centered on P.Once you''ve got the basics of that down, it''s just a question of playing with your f(x,y,z) function to achieve different effects.   Richard "Superpig" Fine- saving pigs from untimely fates, and when he''s not doing that, runs The Binary Refinery.Enginuity1 | Enginuity2 | Enginuity3 | Enginuity4 | Enginuity5ry. .ibu cy. .y''ybu. .abu ry. dy. "sy. .ubu py. .ebu ry. py. .ibu gy." fy. .ibu ny. .ebuPreserve wildlife: pickle a squirrel today! ;  See also: gamasutra article.If you''re in 2d, edge finding is pretty trivial since you can evaluate for every pixel. 3D is more tricky, and the marching cubes algorithm can be used. Unfortunalty thats patented, however theres the marching triangles algorithm that acheives the same effect but isn''t ;  hey thanks for your replies ive just read over those 2 sites and they seem pretty good but you know anywhere thats got any source code?? preferably in OpenGLthanks ;  Most of the Metaball demos I''ve seen have been using things like Inventor, for purely academic stuff.You can''t do this stuff in realtime, so it''s not a terribly popular topic outside of academia and medical imaging. ;  Come to think of it, has anybody even bothered to render metaballs in anything other than raytracers? I don''t think I''ve ever seen a metaball demo that uses a real-time graphics system... ;  Not sure why people think metaballs can't be done in realtime, there are plenty of examples that do. Check out the angelcode link for an excellent demo.Persoanlly the best resource I found washttp://www.astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/modelling/polygonise/Its a straight forward implementation, relatively easy to get ot grips with, but not very optimised.Taking it a step further with some good optimisations is this (DX version I think) demo and source codehttp://www.angelcode.com/dev/metaballs/ [edited by - noisecrime on January 31, 2004 8:30:19 PM];  Metaballs are an old demoscene favorite. Everybody was doing them about 5 years ago, after the torus went out of fashion ;  hey thanks alot for those sites, i just looked at the http://www.astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/modelling/polygonise/and i saw like this huge a$$ list of numbers you had to type in, i know you said this was fairly unoptimized but would you have to type all that stuff in every time you wanna use metaballs?? ;  Fingers is correct, metaballs are very used in the demoscene, just look for the "Please the cookie thing." demo, which if i''m not mistaken, has metaballs, so it is indeed possible in realtime. ;-) 