An intro article about level sets and openvdb

[Kirill Lykov]

I wrote an introduction article about level sets and openvdb. In case if you have any comments, found mistakes in grammar or in the code, write to my mail or in this discussion.

http://kirilllykov.github.com/blog/2013/04/02/level-set-openvdb-intro-1/

The next part should be about surface propagation, level set equation and finite differences.

[OpenVDB Support]

Excellent resources on level sets currently exist in the literature, and many are readily available at no cost online. 

While no offense is intended to the original forum poster, we would like to take this opportunity to endorse particular references that we believe will be most helpful to people who have an interest in level sets, openVDB or both.

Level Sets

5 min introduction to level sets:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_set_method

30 min into to level sets:

Chapter 2 of http://www.museth.org/Ken/Publications_files/PhD10_Christensen.pdf

This contains a concise treatment of the level set equation, and finite difference methods

of solution. 

The following text provides a good survey of the field at the time of publication (2003):

"Level Set Methods and Dynamic Implicit Surfaces" by S. Osher and R. Fedkiw

Numerical methods for level set construction and advection

OpenVDB

5 min introduction to VDB
http://www.openvdb.org/documentation/

Several hour into to VDB
http://www.museth.org/Ken/Publications_files/Museth-VDB_TOG13.pdf

Code Examples

OpenVDB is not a level set tool, but the data structure lends itself well to level-set based

operations, and several level set tools have been implemented both the Houdini SOPs provided

with OpenVDB and in the library itself.

We have taken care to construct several explicit code examples utilizing OpenVDB an optimal
fashion in the exiting codeExamples directory.  The difference between a sophisticated and naive
implementation can be the difference between excellent and mediocre performance.    

This example section is a living document, and  we will happily entertain suggestions for additional examples!

For OpenVDB:
http://www.openvdb.org/documentation/doxygen/codeExamples.html


/David

[xionmark]

Thanks guys for the VDB PDF!  Santa *is* real!


:-)

[ch...@nightmare-vfx.com]

Any ETA on the part 2?

[Kirill Lykov]

Chris, in case if it is about part 2 for my intro - one day I will write it, but I don't know when yet.