scott wrote:
>> 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)

I find that whenever I do this, the points that haven't moved yet look 
all perfect and regular, and the points I've moved by hand look all 
wonky and out of place. A bit like when you try to draw a straight line 
freehand next to some lines drawn with a ruler...

>> 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.

Except that in the other plane, all the points lay exactly on top of 
each other, so you've got to select the correct point in one view, and 
then drag it in another view, then select the next point in the first 
view, and drag it in the second view, and.......

>> 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?

Actually, I didn't realise POV could do NURBS at all! o_O

> Surprisingly with smoothed normals you don't 
> need that much mesh data to get a *really* smooth look

...if you don't mind not having sharp edges...

> 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.

Heh. Well the *track* certainly has plenty of polygons in evidence! :-P

I find it astonishing that there is any hardware on earth that can 
actually render several hundred thousand triangles in less than a 
minute, never mind a second. And yes, with the lashings and lashings of 
trickery applied, you "almost" can't see them in this shot.

Let's see, what have we got? Well, first of all there's the shadow of 
the wing mirror. Both wheel rims have jaggid edges. The front wheel arch 
and the headlights less so. (Presumably when it's flying round the track 
you don't get time to notice these things.)

Certainly it beats the stuff I have to watch in CSS all day! You don't 
have to look very hard to find polygons *everywhere* in just about every 
computer game I've ever seen. But then, it has to be realtime...

I still find it completely incomprehensible that somebody sat down and 
spent months placing 100k individual triangles by hand though...

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