Metaballs
Metaballs (not to be confused with meatballs) is the name of a computer graphics technique for rendering organic-looking n-dimensional objects. Each metaball is defined as a function in n-dimensions (ie. for three dimensions, ; three-dimensional metaballs tend to be most common). A thresholding value is also chosen, to define a solid volume. Then, represents whether the volume enclosed by the surface defined by metaballs is filled at or not.
A typical function chosen for metaballs is , where is the center of the metaball. However, due to the divide, it is computationally expensive. For this reason, approximate polynomial functions are typically used (examples?). There are a number of ways to render the metaballs to the screen. The two most common are brute force raycasting and the Marching Cubes algorithm.
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