Trying to learn marching cubes and feeling overwhelmed. Should I give up?

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  • Marching-Cubes

    Coding Adventure

  • I started with sebastian lague's infinite terrain tutorial. It was cool but the results were plain. It didn't cover caves or how to have overhangs, or mountain ridges, or terraces, erosion, etc. That's how I came across marching cubes, it seemed like marching cubes was required for some of these things and I got the impression I would need to know about it (or something about using 3d noise?) to move forward. Someone told me about his marching cubes video, and I watched that. It didn't really get deep into what he did like in the landmass tutorial. I also watched his terraforming video just to see if all of this would made more sense to me after, but it didn't. So I checked the descriptions of his videos and found a few interesting links. One was from 1987and had to do with Marching Cubes use in the medical field and MR scans and stuff. It went over my head. There was this paper from 1994, which is supposedly a basic explanation of marching cubes, but it too went over my head. Finally, there was this link to the first chapter in Nvidia's GPU Gems 3, which tackled procedural generation with marching cubes running on the GPU? It also went over my head. I found this Unity forum post which has somebody attempting to implement the GPU Gems stuff in Unity, and the person seems to had made some pretty significant progress on it, but it looks like life things got in the way, as it does, and so they haven't posted in that thread since 2014. They didn't post a GitHub repo or anything either. Speaking of repos, I also opened up sebastian lagues GitHub repos for his marching cubes video and for his terraforming video to find something interesting and, while the projects were interesting to look at, it would be a lie to say I actually learned anything by opening them up and looking at them, which was extrememly disappointing. I watched his erosion video too, but when I opened the repo and tried to generate a map, it said it was above some 65555 limit and wouldn't generate anything but a flat plane, so I've been ignoring that one entirely for now. I don't really know where to go from here, and I feel like I've been all across the internet and have nothing to show for it.. I'm about to read these two documents since they were linked in sebastian lagues erosion video description, but I can already tell these will, yet again, go over my head.

  • Terraforming

  • I started with sebastian lague's infinite terrain tutorial. It was cool but the results were plain. It didn't cover caves or how to have overhangs, or mountain ridges, or terraces, erosion, etc. That's how I came across marching cubes, it seemed like marching cubes was required for some of these things and I got the impression I would need to know about it (or something about using 3d noise?) to move forward. Someone told me about his marching cubes video, and I watched that. It didn't really get deep into what he did like in the landmass tutorial. I also watched his terraforming video just to see if all of this would made more sense to me after, but it didn't. So I checked the descriptions of his videos and found a few interesting links. One was from 1987and had to do with Marching Cubes use in the medical field and MR scans and stuff. It went over my head. There was this paper from 1994, which is supposedly a basic explanation of marching cubes, but it too went over my head. Finally, there was this link to the first chapter in Nvidia's GPU Gems 3, which tackled procedural generation with marching cubes running on the GPU? It also went over my head. I found this Unity forum post which has somebody attempting to implement the GPU Gems stuff in Unity, and the person seems to had made some pretty significant progress on it, but it looks like life things got in the way, as it does, and so they haven't posted in that thread since 2014. They didn't post a GitHub repo or anything either. Speaking of repos, I also opened up sebastian lagues GitHub repos for his marching cubes video and for his terraforming video to find something interesting and, while the projects were interesting to look at, it would be a lie to say I actually learned anything by opening them up and looking at them, which was extrememly disappointing. I watched his erosion video too, but when I opened the repo and tried to generate a map, it said it was above some 65555 limit and wouldn't generate anything but a flat plane, so I've been ignoring that one entirely for now. I don't really know where to go from here, and I feel like I've been all across the internet and have nothing to show for it.. I'm about to read these two documents since they were linked in sebastian lagues erosion video description, but I can already tell these will, yet again, go over my head.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • Hydraulic-Erosion

  • I started with sebastian lague's infinite terrain tutorial. It was cool but the results were plain. It didn't cover caves or how to have overhangs, or mountain ridges, or terraces, erosion, etc. That's how I came across marching cubes, it seemed like marching cubes was required for some of these things and I got the impression I would need to know about it (or something about using 3d noise?) to move forward. Someone told me about his marching cubes video, and I watched that. It didn't really get deep into what he did like in the landmass tutorial. I also watched his terraforming video just to see if all of this would made more sense to me after, but it didn't. So I checked the descriptions of his videos and found a few interesting links. One was from 1987and had to do with Marching Cubes use in the medical field and MR scans and stuff. It went over my head. There was this paper from 1994, which is supposedly a basic explanation of marching cubes, but it too went over my head. Finally, there was this link to the first chapter in Nvidia's GPU Gems 3, which tackled procedural generation with marching cubes running on the GPU? It also went over my head. I found this Unity forum post which has somebody attempting to implement the GPU Gems stuff in Unity, and the person seems to had made some pretty significant progress on it, but it looks like life things got in the way, as it does, and so they haven't posted in that thread since 2014. They didn't post a GitHub repo or anything either. Speaking of repos, I also opened up sebastian lagues GitHub repos for his marching cubes video and for his terraforming video to find something interesting and, while the projects were interesting to look at, it would be a lie to say I actually learned anything by opening them up and looking at them, which was extrememly disappointing. I watched his erosion video too, but when I opened the repo and tried to generate a map, it said it was above some 65555 limit and wouldn't generate anything but a flat plane, so I've been ignoring that one entirely for now. I don't really know where to go from here, and I feel like I've been all across the internet and have nothing to show for it.. I'm about to read these two documents since they were linked in sebastian lagues erosion video description, but I can already tell these will, yet again, go over my head.

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