voxel-to-mesh

There are a number of techniques for transforming voxel data

  [
    [0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 1]
  ]

into polygonal meshes

{
  vertices: [
    [0, 1, 0],
    [0, 1, 1],
    [0, 0, 1],
    [0, 0, 0],
    [1, 0, 0],
    [1, 0, 1],
    [1, 1, 1],
    [1, 1, 0],
    [0, 1, 2],
    [0, 0, 2],
    [1, 0, 2],
    [1, 1, 2]
  ],
  indices: [
    [0, 1, 2, 3],
    [4, 5, 6, 7],
    [3, 4, 7, 0],
    [2, 5, 4, 3],
    [0, 7, 6, 1],
    [1, 8, 9, 2],
    [5, 10, 11, 6],
    [8, 11, 10, 9],
    [9, 10, 5, 2],
    [1, 6, 11, 8]
  ]
}

Voxel-to-mesh utilizes a basic culling technique where any shared faces between voxels are pruned from the mesh. Furthermore, the vertices of these now unconnected lips are consolidated to remove T-junctions. Removing T-junctions is important for at least 2 reasons.

1. There are instances when T-junctions can cause visible discontinuities in your mesh.
2. Having a closed mesh is necessary for many mesh transformation algorithms such as catmull-clark smoothing.

In the above example, we have two adjacent voxel cubes: [0,0,0] and [0,0,1]. They share a face so those rects can be culled. We can see the result has 10 indices (ie rects) instead of 12 (2 * 6 faces) and only 12 vertices instead of 16 (2 * 8 vertices). Culling means our meshes are smaller and will render faster.

1. 3 Color mesh
2. Wireframe mesh

install

  $ npm install voxel-to-mesh

Usage

  const voxelToMesh = require('voxel-to-mesh');
 
  let voxels = [
    [0, 0, 0],
    [0, 0, 1]
  ];
 
  const options = {
  	color: [0, 255, 0, 0.5], //rgba
  	flatten: false
  }
 
  let mesh = voxelToMesh(voxels, options)

API

voxelToMesh(voxels [,options])

int[][] voxels
JSON {} options:
    int[] color: default null
    boolean convertToTriangles: default true,
    boolean flatten: default true

license

MIT