When I was using 3ds max a few years back my preferred method of modeling was spline modeling. It entailed creating a spline cage and Max created patches in between the splines. Texturing always worked fine with this method and I could vary the tessellation level with ease. I didn't do anything real complicated, but for what I did it worked great.
Bezier Curves Instead Of Polygons
- Thread starter Color me Dan
- Start date
I think what Color me Dan is really thinking about is HOS, and as such NURBS and SDS and anything else that is parametric curves instead of polygons can all be lumped together as an alternative representation of geometry.
That was my favorite version and the only one I ever bought personally. :smile:
Do you mean out of fashion as in people rarely use it now or it doesn't even exist in the product anymore? I've not even touched Max since 6 and never used 5 or 6 much.
ShootMyMonkey
Veteran
Well, in the case of a raytracer, it's generally faster to compute intersections on the implicit surface of a spline object as opposed to a similar-quality mesh of triangles. Similarly, with subdivision surfaces, you'd do best to raytrace them using the theoretical spline surface that corresponds to that base mesh. e.g. limit for a Catmull-Clark or Doo-Sabin tend towards bicubic and biquadratic (respectively) uniform B-spline surfaces for a given initial mesh.
