This might sound dumb, but is there such a thing as \'round\' polygons?

I know that I polygon is something with more then three edges, but is there \'round\' or \'circular\' polygons?

Like, could they make a perfectly round car wheel instead of a 26 edged polygon that sorta looks like round.

I am so dumb...

I\'m not sure, but I think they\'re called NURBs. I\'m just as dumb, but I\'m bored, so I wanted to reply...

NURBS are the next step forward, and enable rounded surfaces. I think Q3 used \'em. I read a long article about this in EDGE once but it was all too technical for me. I think the abbreviation stands for Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines, whatever that means

I\'m sure some techhead is to come by and explain all this to us silly people.

Yes, NURBs aren\'t polygons. I\'m sorry if that sounded like that. I remember they were for curved 3D objects though. I read about it in The EDGE\'s sister mag Next Generation waaaay back in a preview for Elastica (sp?).

ahhh NURBs, i love to use them in lightwave, they are basiclally curved 3d round objects, but aren\'t polys. When you moddel an object (a curvy one!) you have to model it in nurbs first and then "FREEZE" it meaning turning the nurbs into polygons. i don\'t know how it works but it is really cool. I think they used NURBs in Q3 (for al the curves) but Im not so sure if they mean the METANURBS used in 3dsmax and lightwave

I\'ve read that WRC uses Nurbs for the cars

NOTHING is perfectly round... on a computer screen, it\'s all lines that are very close to appearing round, but never truly. Did you know that the earth is more perfectly round than a basketball?

Now that I have astonished you with my impressive knowledge, I\'ll take my proziac and go to sleep *yawn*

I thought the earth was more oval shaped then round...

Originally posted by ##RaCeR##
I thought the earth was more oval shaped then round...

Tisk silly Human

the Earth is FLAT and everyone knows that :rolleyes:.

I thought it was called Bezier Curves
That\'s what I read Quake3 uses and that the PS2 does in hardware

There are Voxels... which are cheaper than polygons. Sony was going to place a cheap Voxel engine inside the Ps2 along with the EE and GS. But I guess they figured that that would be to much for the developers to handle!

Voxels seem to be kinda out of date. The last game to use a voxel engine (for the terrain) was Outcast. I remember the good ol\' Comanche PC game, with voxely terrain. Looks quite bad by nowadays\' standards, but it was ahead of it\'s time when it came out.

I\'ve been trying to find proper definitions for NURBS (I\'ve leafed through about 30 issues of EDGE to find that damn article), and I\'ve come to the conclusion that No-one Understands Really Bendy Stuff (as one website I visited said) is a very good definition for the term. Nurbs are just a mathematical way to represent 3D data, and you can shape your 3D items to be perfect circles, balls, eggs and freeform geometry. Simple. Or not. My brains were ready to move to Hawaii for a looong vacation after 5 minutes of going through all the mathematical gibberish.

And yes, Q3 used bezier curves (like in that tongue in that... er, one level), my bad, damn terms.

I work with Nurbs in Maya almost every friggin day.
I just draw these curves, manipulate them and then
make surfaces out of them. Out of them surfaces I make
objects. Of course I can use the default nurbs cube, nurbs sphere ( which Maya offers )and so on as well.
Knotter8

There are round polygons...they\'re called "spheres".

Originally posted by JP
I thought it was called Bezier Curves
That\'s what I read Quake3 uses and that the PS2 does in hardware

I think bezier curve technology is actually more of a polygon management system. From what I\'ve heard what it does is assign as many polygons as the system can handle to a given object at a specific time so as to make them appear as round as possible. Therfore the system is always operating at a very high level of efficiency.
So it doesn\'t actually involve anything other than regular old flat polygons.

There are round polygons...they\'re called "spheres".

Uh, polygons means multiple angles, so a sphere having no angles can\'t really be a polygon. I imagine you were kidding so I\'m just clearing that up for anybody that\'s confused.