How Computers Draw Weird Shapes

In this video, we start with an interesting animation of blobby objects which we introduce as metaballs. There’s a lot of surprisingly intricate ideas behind making these objects render on a screen. We’ll see how folks in computer graphics attempted to solve this problem through a really elegant algorithm called marching squares. Marching squares is a really powerful algorithm that allows you to render any implicit function. But what’s even more impressive in my opinion is the many clever shifts in perspective that allowed a vague problems such as this one to be transformed into a clear, well-defined, and solvable problem. 0:00 Introduction 3:29 Circles and Ellipses 4:57 Defining the Problem 6:00 A Guessing Game 8:29 Contours around Two Points 10:35 Sampling The Space 12:32 Breaking Down Cases 15:00 A Clever Optimization 17:20 How Marching Squares Works 18:59 Parallel Marching Squares 20:21 How Do Metaballs Work? 24:59 Marching Cubes 25:58 Some Parting Thoughts References/Additional Resources: http://jamie-