> Jesus, how did you get so many points all spaced out so perfectly like 
> that?? o_O It must have taken you *hours*!

I started with a n x n grid of vertices in a plane... ( a blender primitive)

> Also... just placing them in 2D is no good. You have to somehow position 
> them in 3D space - which (in every package I've seen) is absurdly hard.

...and then in blender you can split your view into 4 so you have left, top, 
front and 3D all visible at the same time with the appropiate 2D image you 
are copying from in each background.  It's then remarkably simple to just 
drag each vertex to where it should be.

> The difference being that NURBS produce a well-defined mathematical 
> surface which can be drawn at arbitrary resolution and can contain sharp 
> corners, whereas a polygon mesh presents only a very crude approximation 
> to such a surface (unless you generate terabytes of mesh data).

You do realise that NURBS objects are converted to meshes before being 
rendered, even in POV?  Surprisingly with smoothed normals you don't need 
that much mesh data to get a *really* smooth look, 100k triangles for a car 
and you'll be very hard pushed to see any mesh artifacts.

http://www.greatwallofgaming.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/gt5-prologue-5.jpg

That is rendered in realtime on the PS3, see any triangles in the car 
models? (I think I remember reading somewhere the models are about 100k 
triangles per car).  I can just about make out the mesh around the front 
wheel arch, but if they just applied 1 extra level of subdivision for a 
rendered shot that would disappear.

Post a reply to this message