In Conclusion

 
progress indicator progress indicator progress indicator progress indicator

Chapter List

Chapter 7: Basic Surface Concepts and Bezier Surfaces
Chapter 8: B-Spline Surfaces
Chapter 9: NURBS Surfaces
Chapter 10: More NURBS Surfaces
Chapter 11: Higher-Order Surfaces in DirectX

Part Overview

Curves are interesting and useful, but the most interesting 3D objects are built as collections of surfaces. In many cases, those surfaces are built with polygons with no explicit mathematical description. In this section, I will expand the previous curve concepts to surfaces and show how you can build complex shapes from simple and compact mathematical curves.

There are many advantages to a mathematical form. Much of this material was developed for CAD applications and fields like ship design where explicit shapes are an integral part of the design process. The idea of designing with a set of curves and shapes can also be useful for game developers when developing manmade shapes, such as cars and spaceships, or organic shapes, such as faces and trees. Another advantage is that these surfaces have a very compact representation. One mathematical surface can define the location of millions of vertices at several levels of detail. This can be very useful in an era of dynamic networked games and games with a very high amount of detail.

Although I cover several forms of surfaces, I do not cover subdivision surfaces. I chose not to address subdivision surfaces because there was no way to cover both NURBS and subdivision surfaces adequately in the space available. I chose to concentrate instead on NURBS because these representations provide a basis for subdivision surfaces at the mathematical level. If you have a solid understanding of how NURBS surfaces work, you will have an easier time with the mechanics of subdivision surfaces. Therefore, the material herein should prove useful no matter what type of surface you choose to use.

In Part 2, I introduced curves in order of increasing complexity. In this part, I follow the same path . Chapter 7 explains basic surface concepts in the context of relatively simple Bezier patches. From there, Chapters 8 and 9 apply those concepts to B-spline surfaces and NURBS surfaces. Chapter 10 will show how NURBS can be used to describe a wide variety of shapes using relatively simple constructs.

Finally, in Chapter 11, I'll explain how the new features of DirectX 8.1 and 9.0 can be used to render higher-order surfaces. You'll see how you can exploit the advantages of higher-order surfaces with a higher-level interface.

progress indicator progress indicator progress indicator progress indicator


Focus on Curves and Surfaces
Focus On Curves and Surfaces (Focus on Game Development)
ISBN: 159200007X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 104
Authors: Kelly Dempski

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net