QUOTE(Dalebonics @ 11/18/05, 09:16 AM) [snapback]220101[/snapback]
Will the next gen consoles (Microsoft,Sony,Nintendo) support real time
NURBS?
no. They are basically ShaderModel 3 render boxes. It is feasable to use Nurbs in realtime, and has been for a while, however you'd have to code that yourself. Hardware extensions for Nurbs would be a very very bad idea. MotoGP for example (xbox) used Nurbs for the motor bike rendering......
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How would they avoid tearing at stiched seams? I suppose it depends on how
far away from the camera the object is. This would mean a model could yield any tesselation needed. Eliminating LODs.
The same way as you avoid the problems with software nurbs. The code is the same.... Maya & Xsi render nurbs in realtime after all (the definately don't use gluNurbs....)
The biggest drawback of nurbs is that are very good a adding lod, but ultimately rubbish at the low lod end of things. A few well placed polygons will always serve you better than a low-tesselation nurbs surface. Infact, with nurbs it's the change of lod that is expensive - not the tesselation or rendering. Things like skinning & blendshapes are far more efficient, however you need to cache a lot of blending values to make them run somewhere near real time - which kinda defeats the point.
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This question has been festering lately. Can anyone shed some light?
as a games coder, if you went to the art team and suggested doing all of the character modelling in nurbs, they'd rip your arms and legs off..... that's the main reason why i don't imagine many games will be using them.
If you suggested sub-divs, the artists may be a bit happier - but the CPU hit is a bit too much for a console... (possible, but you'd be loosing some processing power you could put to better use elsewhere)
