Constructive solid geometry mesh

Question

If I construct a shape using constructive solid geometry techniques, how can I construct a wireframe mesh for rendering? I'm aware of algorithms for directly rendering CSG shapes, but I want to convert it into a wireframe mesh just once so that I can render it "normally"

To add a little more detail. Given a description of a shape such as "A cube here, intersection with a sphere here, subtract a cylinder here" I want to be able to calculate a polygon mesh.

Answer 1

Here are some Google Scholar links which may be of use.

From what I can tell of the abstracts, the basic idea is to generate a point cloud from the volumetric data available in the CSG model, and then use some more common algorithms to generate a mesh of faces in 3D to fit that point cloud.

Edit: Doing some further research, this kind of operation is called "conversion from CSG to B-Rep (boundary representation)". Searches on that string lead to a useful PDF:

http://www.scielo.br/pdf/jbsmse/v29n4/a01v29n4.pdf

And, for further information, the key algorithm is called the "Marching Cubes Algorithm". Essentially, the CSG model is used to create a volumetric model of the object with voxels, and then the Marching Cubes algorithm is used to create a 3D mesh out of the voxel data.