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Comment by lmpdev | Hacker News Reader

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lmpdev·

I wonder if there's an opportunity down the line as engines get faster for NURBs + modern texture rendering?

Especially for geometrically simple shapes like this coin

After using Rhino 3D for a while, meshes feel "dirty"

I know NURBs would be much slower to render but I think it could be a potential future look for games

NB I'm not a game developer or 3D modeller

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One of the largest problems with moving to anything other than triangles as the rendering primitive is the decades of industry investment in pipelines for producing and hardware (on the player end) designed and optimized to push triangles. There would be huge issue with backwards compatibility for a GPU that defaulted to anything other than triangles, not to mention the graphics API’s designed for those triangle pushers.

Nurbs are not efficient for realtime rendering.

There's no reason to encode all that curve data if all you care about in the end is a finite set of pixels rendered on the screen.

You can achieve the same level of detail without having to recalculate the surfaces. It's a lot easier for the computer to morph a shape by applying some math function (that's essentially arithmetic) to all the polygon's vertexes.

That said, I've seen some 3d artists work in NURBs, then render out to Polygons.

GPUs have implemented tessellation shaders for a long time now, and they can be used to implement what you describe. The Xbox 360 already had them, but it was too slow at the time so not used much. If I'm not mistaken, later generations have used them extensively.

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