Polygon why the hell?!?!

I hate to break it to you, but those models from quake are *gasp* composed of polygons.

A polygon is the basic 3d shape used to construct more complex shapes in 3d. Now we could use bezier patches, (and they do in movies to get nice curves) but those pose problems that are not worth tackling yet in games.

If you want to write 3d games, you better get used to liking polygons.

so you''re saying to draw a picture in 3d you need to draw every single polygon on the model??

The short answer is yes.

The long answer (if you want to get technical here) is no. You can draw all of them, but most algorythms only draw the visible polygons, i.e. the ones facing the camera, and the ones that are not being clipped by objects or offscreen.

that what modelers are for. most pro 3d engines come with level and character editors.

JoeMont001@aol.com www.polarisoft.n3.net

From what I know, there are two ways to draw curves. The first is like you mentioned, subdivide the curve until it looks smooth.

The second is to use freeform surfaces for rendering i.e. nurbs. Quake 3 as I recall uses splines to draw curves, but I don''t know of the top if they then subdivide the splines to polygynal pieces, or if they render the splines in hardware. That''s something I''d like to know.

so what are splines, nurbs and stuff? Can someone introduce me to 3d programming?

Well here are the very basics. Two verticies (points in 3d space) can be joined by a straight line. However they can also be joined by a curve. How do you define this curve? Well you can create what are called Bezier Curves where one sets control points and given a function that I can''t remember off the top of my head, produces a curve.

The nice thing is, that given these control points the curve will always look the same on all machines. You can see that a complex polygon, instead of having all the verticies joined by lines, can be thought of as a set of control points that produce a nice curve.

These are the basis for nurbs, and other freeform surfaces. If you really want more info on the matter, I suggest you buy a comp. graphics book, or if you''re in university take the CG course.