# Marching Cubes / Metaballs

**Track:** Advanced 3D — Advanced Creative Coding — proposed (50)
**Framework / surface:** three.js
**Level:** Hard
**Prerequisites:** Custom BufferGeometry From Scratch

**In one line:** Isosurface meshing from a scalar field for blobby geometry.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Surfaces can be extracted from volume rather than modeled directly. Marching cubes, introduced by William Lorensen and Harvey Cline at SIGGRAPH 1987, samples a scalar field on a grid, classifies each cube's eight corners as inside or outside a threshold, and consults a table of triangulations to stitch a polygon mesh along the isosurface. The field itself is often a sum of metaballs—Jim Blinn's 1982 "blobby" model, where each source contributes a radial falloff and overlapping sources merge with smooth, surface-tension-like necks. Together they generate organic, mercurial geometry: droplets that coalesce and split, soft implicit forms impossible to build vertex by vertex, meshed on the fly as the field evolves.