While I was on the #blender IRC asking about bezier curves someone pointed out a link to a 3D model someone made entirely out of bezier curves. It was an awesome-looking chain gun with interlocking gears, perfectly smooth curves and a mirror finish! :eek: :yes: Sadly, I forgot to save the link…
It’s too bad that more 3D models don’t use bezier curves. You get perfectly curved lines and surfaces without any of the polygon sharp corners nonsense. And a mere handful of bezier curves could easily replace tens of thousands of vertices, edges, and faces. Seems to me that this, in theory, might allow 3D games to have lots of near photorealistic models without as much demand on the CPU, gfx card, and memory. I suspect many otherwise complex model files could be much smaller, too. Then again, I’m not familiar with the resources that are required to render bezier-curved models, nor the game formats that would support such models.
I think what is needed is a nearly transparent method of mixing ordinary vertices and edges with bezier curves. From what I can tell this is not currently possible. But it should be possible if Blender treats the regular edges as merely straight bezier curves. Just need an easy method to convert back and forth. And a way to recalculate and simplify polygon meshes into curves. (Like “Decimate”… only for converting to bezier curves.)
Doing so might make using bezier curves more user-friendly and accessable to users and, hence, more models would take advantage of this.
Is this something worth suggesting on the Blender development forum?
Would doing so require a lot of additional code?
That would be great, then we could do bevel objects on all the edges of our mesh. But even in three dee, I can’t see how you can model something great with curves, being one dee themselves, even with bevel objects you can only emphasize edges really. Too bad I can’t see that model…
It’s possible, but remember that in most 3D apps (Blender included), all geometry - even curves - is converted into triangles. Proof of this is in the DefResolU and RenResolU values in the Curve and Surface panel of Edit buttons when working with a curve. Try setting the DefResoluU value to something low like 3 and you’ll see a surface that is not perfectly smooth.
Short answer: even curves aren’t perfectly smooth… and they may be computationally more expensive to work with than polys. That said… I’ve seen and made some models with curves that would’ve taken much longer if I had to use polys. Right tool for the right job.
I explained in the post; I made it just now using all curves and said it’s good indeed for cylindrical stuff. Right below the image. maybe I should’ve double spaced. I’m kinda new here and not sure now if that counts as spam.
