Curfed Surfaces Evil?

[Arcane Wizard]

Does anybody happen to know why curfed surfaces are hardly used anymore? (if at all)

[optimize]

I'm guessing it's because curves use more processing power...?

[Arcane Wizard]

Well, a single one just might, but what sort of a game has only 1 surface? Pong has over 4. Overall they use far, far, less processesing power because even a single curfed surface would take hundreds of polygons to render at a somewhat similar detail.

I can remember them getting somewhat popular with the QuakeIII engine and all, but these days developers seem to prefer to waste half the processing power on rendering edgy breasts.

[BarrenSoul]

??? have you seen some of the wire meshes for the new U3 engine? curved surfaces abound! but normal maps are used to represent the curve (havn't seen the low res renders just high res)

I can gaurentee I will know the answer within 2 years (going to college next year)


If you want I can post pictures of the models.

[Arcane Wizard]

The models use a lot of polygons, they just look curfed.

http://www.unrealtechnology.com/screens/EmbryWire.jpg
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/screens/ch...r_creation1.jpg
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/screens/ch...r_creation2.jpg

http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml

The only possible occurence of curfed surfaces I see is the pavement at the bottom right of EmbryWire.jpg but to me it looks like regular polygons where used like the rest of that rendering.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&clien...btnG=Search&lr=

[BarrenSoul]

erm... try using curved not curfed :)

doom3's levels support them take a look

http://www.viavga.com/articleimages/de/light11.jpg

here's a tutorial on how to make them in the level editor

http://www.viavga.com/default.asp?PageID=138

I know who I'll ask, the man who made the build engine. (he's also making voxlap now )Voxlap

[Arcane Wizard]

Doom3 makes sense, since it's also from ID software, but great new games like World of Warcraft either don't use them at all or don't use them for surfaces that should be curved.

Take Dawn of War for example, if it even supports brezier patches at all, it's certainly not used anywhere noticable like the character meshes where they would've been extremely usefull. (especially since they now have to use 3 different model detail settings to get a bit of a rounded, more natural, look, but it's still not close to how it would look with curved surfaces)

Same goes for World of Warcraft, America's Army, even the Half Life Source engine has edgy (high-polygon) character models with I don't know how many model detail settings to keep from using curved surfaces where they should be used.

[Weregoose]

[BarrenSoul]

> Why are curved surfaces not supported very often?


Supporting curved surfaces is lot of extra work! Here are the main problems with curved surfaces:
* No 3D accelerator supports them natively - so you must tesselate. Often, this is done at run-time.
* When editing a map, how do you ensure that the curves connect to the rest of the world without forming gaps? As an engine programmer, I don't know a good solution for this - other than to trust the map designer to get it right.
* You'll need to upgrade your collision code - this can be a lot of work!

It would be possible to render true curved surfaces in a software engine without the need for tesselation. If I did it, I would advantage of the SSE instruction set which comes with the Pentium III or above. It's a shame that nobody writes software engines anymore (except for me : )

there's your explanatin ^_^

Dawn of war dosn't use curved? meh I don't look that close :) but it's a shame since you could compare the in game models to the puter ones :) I have a few of the old obliterators and they look WAY cooler then the new ones. the new ones have more of a "fleshy" look like the ingame mine look like walking suits of patched armour :) (if you know about the storyline behinde oblits you would understand the reason mine look better)

[Arcane Wizard]

[BarrenSoul]

I think he was reffering to the fact that alot of game companies licence engines now instead of make them.

Can you point a professionaly developed game made in J2ME by a big name company?

[Arcane Wizard]

You're a big name company?

[BarrenSoul]

the hell? no of course not I'm just curious because you *coughed* J2ME reffering to game engines so I was wondering if there was a big name company that had used it.

[Brazucs]

Curfed Surfaces now exist!
Click

[leofox]

[BarrenSoul]

wanna know the creepy thing leofox? his google search for curfed surfaces about 3 days ago returned nothing but all of the sudden there are returns on it -_-' (and yes they actually mean curved or atleast they should since there is no english word "curfed")