Using Marching Cubes on Small Machines

A simple technique to visualize the isosurfaces extracted from a cell-based volumetric dataset using the Marching Cubes algorithm is proposed. The technique exploits the intrinsic ordering of the triangles produced by the surface extraction algorithm by adopting a Back-to-Front visualization technique. The use of the technique together with the adoption of a simple shading algorithm permits the rendering of high resolution volumetric datasets in computational environments with limited capabilities in terms of memory and graphics hardware.