2D Metaballs in HLSL

A quick and dirty implementation of metaballs (blobby things) in 2D, using C#, XNA and HLSL.

This video demonstrates a simple HLSL *.fx file for creating metaball isosurfaces in a 2D plane. They are actually very easy to implement, and can return some very impressive results.

The videos spliced together demonstrate how changing the clamping values for the metaball function, as well as the gradient image, can yield some very nice visual effects in just one draw call.

Demonstrated are 24 metaballs with the same weight moving around in 2D space with a variable lower and upper clamp at 60fps vsync'd.

Eventually I will get around to separating the code from my current work-in-progress XNA game and submit it to allow you to see how the code works.

Music used is 'North Sea Radio' by Paneye, under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0:
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Paneye/Lost_In_A_Dark_Aquarium/New_Weird_Au...

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• .net
• visual
• studio
• 2010
• xna
• c#
• pixel
• shader
• hlsl
• fx
• metaball
• meta
• ball
• isosurface
• iso
• surface
• 2D