Every 3D modelling software simply uses a series of flat polygons, small enough to appear curved, to created spheres etc. Why? Why can technology even today find it easier to render literally millions of little triangles, than just one curve?
In: Technology
***There isn’t really such a thing as a curve.*** Just things that look so much like curves from far away, that’s what we call them.
Paint a curve on a wall? It’s just millions of drops of paint. Letters on paper? Millions of little blots of ink. The round bottoms of glass cups? Through a microscope, you’ll see the individual grains of glass – more like a beach than a smooth line. The curve around the edge of the moon? It only looks like a perfect circle from down here. Up there, it’s thousands of mountains.
The same goes for all shapes. There’s no such thing. There are no triangles or squares. Just triangle-shaped, square-shaped things.
In the real world it’s easy to find trillions of things, because things can be as small as a dust speck. In the computer world, everything must be counted before it is drawn. A computer can count high and fast, but it can’t go forever. Eventually it has to stop counting and tell the monitor what to show you. If it works hard and draws ten million points and you can still see where each point is, it still won’t look much like a curve. It will look pointy!
But we have a few tricks up our sleeve. We tell computers to draw better curves by automatically snipping lines and curving them themselves. The more time we give them, the better this works, so expensive time-consuming CGI can have pretty realistic curves, whereas your average day-to-day computer experience will not be very curvy at all.
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