The problem is probably familiar to everyone. To draw smooth, non-acute objects requires a huge number of polygons. Sometimes it exceeds all imaginable limits. As an option, you can use tessellation, but it also seems to me not the most optimal way. What could be the solution? For example, you want to draw a slightly rounded wall and draw a texture on it. Many primitive objects can be set using mathematical equations, but how to get the final product on the screen as a result is the essence of the question. Complex models of people, transport, and architecture are almost impossible to depict by an equation, but any tori, spheres, pipes, cubes with rounded corners, and various modifications can be represented in a similar way.

    2 answers 2

    To draw smooth, non-acute objects requires a huge number of polygons. Sometimes it exceeds all imaginable limits.

    When you finish the game, new video cards will come out and these limits will be removed. Even now, video cards swallow millions of polygons and do not choke. Now for games there are no alternatives to polygonal graphics.

    For example, you want to draw a slightly rounded wall and draw a texture on it.

    Shaders with correctly spaced normals can help smooth it out, and make a good cylinder from a 10-sided prism.

    Ray tracing best draws the shapes given by the equations, but for now it is slow. We must wait for 5 years. Although, while you make the game, they will be over.

    Complex models of people, transport, and architecture are almost impossible to portray as equations.

    People are hardly possible, but transport and buildings consist of more or less regular shaped parts. You can set them by several equations. Look at this topic here:

    Fractal game world

    There are a lot of pictures, some of them are quite normal, made with the help of ray tracing. How do they write, they work it almost in real time.

    • The topic is very interesting. And the screenshots are not bad. The farther the better. The complexity of the scene increases. But for a start it would be nice to practice on something simple, and not get into the jungle of complex fractal objects. - OpenGLprogrammer
    • He writes that he has only one formula that creates these "wilds of complex fractal objects." Everything happens in one small pixel shader. - gammaker

    I just heard about the way where objects are drawn pixelly, where a pixel is represented as a volume ball for example. With a very close examination of the object, you can see the lattice of these balls, and from afar as a whole looks.

    • 2
      Voxel engines. - Nofate ♦