Hi!
I you have a mathematical description of a surface (that describes all the points on the surface), how would go about creating a polygonal approximation for that surface?
What are the mathematics behind this called? What terms are used? What keywords do you use when searching for information about this on the net?
/Daniel
You mean, curves like Bezier splines or curved surfaces with Bezier Patches? Search for “curved surfaces”.
If you have an implicit definition (like x^2 + y^2 + z^2 - r^2 = 0 for a sphere), try searching for “marching cubes.” It is a pretty decent way of drawing polygonal approximation of isosurfaces.
If you can massage your definition (of the form f(x, y, z) = 0) into a functional one
(like z = f(x, y)), that might be better because doing the spline approximation thing(by sampling the function domain) is quite a bit simpler/faster.
-Won