[sldev] Sculpties: Vacuum-Forming, Skittering, Zone Linking

[Dale Mahalko]

On 10/8/07, Argent Stonecutter <secret.argent at gmail.com> wrote:
> It would be better just to require a low detail and a high detail mesh.
>

There might be a still better way to store shape data which hasn't
been discovered yet. An interesting direction is to look at how
TrueType / Postscript outline fonts are defined vs bitmap fonts.

Perhaps it'd be possible to have a similar scale-free outline shape in
3D-space, defined via control points and handles, which has no
specific predefined vertexes at all.

This would be very low bandwidth since you just need to know a few
anchor and control points to define a mathematically-perfect shape
that could be built up on the fly out of thousands of triangles by the
client's computer -- a sort of freeform prim.

In this situation, LOD is just simply a question of how finely the
client renderer decides to auto-generate a mesh to match that outline
form, and a person on a slow computer can have the objects really
roughly shaped while a fast quad-CPU system can go with ultra-fine
meshes, all generated from the same base outline-shape.

I don't know what the heck to even call this since nothing like it
apparantly exists. Outline meshes? :-)

- Scalar Tardis / Dale Mahalko