Everyone who loves Quake Champions is impressed by the high-quality graphics (ideal for creating 3D configurators), light maps and character animations. Although they’ve done an excellent job painting the text details, most of their characters are made up of hundreds of triangles that can’t capture very detailed geometry. Over the past few decades, Subdivision Surfaces has attracted a lot of attention from academics and industry experts alike, and film industry professionals even use Subdivision Surfaces to create complex characters and fluid animations.
In the following article we will briefly explain what Subdivision Surfaces are and why you should use them in your game programming.
What are Subdivision Surfaces?
The idea of Subdivision Surfaces was introduced in 1978 by Catmull & Clark and Doo & Sabin. In contrast to conventional spline surfaces, Subdivision Surfaces are defined algorithmically. Recently, there has been a lot of activity in the computer graphics research community and significant progress has been made in rendering, texture mapping, animating and compressing Subdivision Surfaces. They were also used in the production of Geri’s game and A Bug’s Life. Geri’s hands, head, jacket and trousers were each modeled with a single Subdivision Surface. The surfaces and hands of Flick and Hopper were also modeled with Subdivision Surfaces. Momentum builds on computer-aided geometric design (CAGD) to make Subdivision Surfaces one of the modelling primitives.
Why Subdivision Surfaces?
Subdivision Surfaces lie somewhere between polygon meshes and patch surfaces and offer some of the best features. The well defined surface normality makes it possible to render them smooth without the faceted appearance of a polygonal geometry with a low number of polygons and it can render smooth surfaces with any topology (with holes or boundaries) without the limitation of patches where the number of columns and rows must be identical before two patches can be merged. Second, Subdivision Surfaces are simply constructed by recursive splitting and averaging: In division, four new faces are created by removing an old face, in averaging, a weighted average of neighboring nodes is created for the new nodes. Because the basic operations are so simple, they are very easy to implement and efficient to perform. Also due to the recursive nature of the subdivision, it goes without saying that the subdivision allows control of the level of detail by adaptive subdivision. In this way, triangular budgets can be output in regions where more detail is required by further subdividing them.
Basics of Subdivision Surfaces.
The simple splitting process usually starts with a rough control mesh, the repeated iteration of this process leads to so-called semi-regular meshes. A node is regular if it has six neighbors (in the triangle mesh) and four neighbors (in the square mesh). Vertices that are not regular are called extraordinary. Meshes derived from standard modeling packages or 3D scanning devices usually do not have a regular structure, so it is necessary to convert these irregular meshes into half regularities, a process called remeshing.
We don’t want to go into the subject further at this point, but just wanted to briefly explain “What Subdivision Surfaces is all about and why you should use this technique in your game programming”. If you still have questions, please feel free to contact our expert Ismail via the forum.
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