Nathan Kopp <Nat### [at] Koppcom> writes:

> Jeff Garzik wrote:
> > 
> > Patch wizards -- are there any fundamental reasons why NURBS would be
> > difficult to implement in POV?  Perhaps I could take a crack at working
> > up a nurbs patch.
> > 
> >         Jeff
> 
> I don't know about working with NURBS directly (that would be really slow,
> from my experience), but converting to triangles should be pretty easy.  I
> actually had a version of POV that would read in NURBS.  It was really just
> a front-end parser to the triangle-mesh object.  POV's triangle mesh object
> is actually pretty efficient (both with memory and rendering speed).  But
> my code was really slow and may have had some bugs.  I still have it lying
> around (I think), so if you want it I'll send it.  Also, didn't somebody
> else ask for it once?  I may have forgotten to give it to that person.
> oops. ;-)

Did you consider to generate the triangles "on the fly" while rendering
takes place? This technique is used for Bezier patches. You can choose
between the two methods by a switch. (But probably, you already know all
this.)

In my opinion an analogous implementation of Bezier patches and NURBS
would be nice (and very useful).

Thomas

-- 
http://www.fmi.uni-konstanz.de/~willhalm

Post a reply to this message