As no interpolations are needed for this technique it consumes few CPU seconds. This technique produces surfaces in the domain of the scalar quantity on which the scalar quantity has the same value, the so-called isosurface value . The surfaces can be colored according to the isosurface value or they can be colored according to another scalar field using the texture technique. The latter case allows for the search for correlation between different scalar quantities. There are different methods to generate the surfaces from a discrete set of data points.
All methods use interpolation to construct a continuous function.
The correctness of the generated surfaces depends on how well the constructed continuous function matches the underlying continuous function representing the discrete data set. The method which is implemented in the software packages described in chapter 3, is the Marching Cube Algorithm. This technique makes it possible to view scalar data on a cross-section of the data volume with a cutting plane. One defines a regular, Cartesian grid on the plane and the data values on this grid are found by interpolation of the original data. A convenient colormap is used to make the data visible.