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

[Dale Mahalko]

On 10/9/07, Jason Giglio <gigstaggart at gmail.com> wrote:
> NURBS sounds like what you are talking about.  Rendering them in
> realtime is potentially difficult.

It's not necessarily the same thing, because NURBS is usually
ridiculously high detail with a very dense sheet of control points.
Having thousands of control points across a scene is acceptable for
something like Maya since render time isn't really constrained and
rendering precision is more important than render speed. If raytracing
a dense scene takes a day per frame for a professional 3D editor, oh
well.

What I'm talking about would use just the minimal number of anchors
and control points to define the surface of a shape, to be as
bandwidth-efficient as possible.

To reduce processing load, calculation of a mesh for the outline
surface might only be a one-shot process when the outline shape loads
for the first time on the client.

The client could pre-generate and locally cache just three or four
stepped-LOD mesh versions, and use the cached meshes whenever the
shape is needed. This way the client isn't repeatedly regenerating a
new mesh for every frame.

If game companies could figure out a way to implement outline
shapes/surfaces, then 3D games wouldn't becomes "dated" so quickly.
The triangle density for an old game could progressively improve to
match the capability of better and faster new hardware, without
needing to go back and re-edit raw vertex models to manually add more
triangle detail.

- Scalar Tardis / Dale Mahalko