The polygon mesh of the tiger from lecture seems to have curved regions. I remember Prof. Ng gave good rationale for using triangles for rasterization (one of them that triangles are planar in higher dimensions), but is it possible to construct curved triangles instead of flat ones in 3d space? Or would we have to make many flat triangles to have this effect?
Answer from Mingyang on Ed: Like you mentioned, one of the main advantages of triangles is that they're always flat (and, by extension, tend to be a lot easier and quicker to work with, especially with GPUs). Using curved triangles is possible, but you end up losing out on many of the aforementioned advantages that triangles offer over quads, so you'll typically end up using many flat triangles to create the curvature effect.
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Thanks, @rishiskhare and Mingyang! To add on, curved surfaces in 3D graphics are usually approximated with fine triangle meshes that have small triangles -- with all the triangles being planar.
The polygon mesh of the tiger from lecture seems to have curved regions. I remember Prof. Ng gave good rationale for using triangles for rasterization (one of them that triangles are planar in higher dimensions), but is it possible to construct curved triangles instead of flat ones in 3d space? Or would we have to make many flat triangles to have this effect?
Answer from Mingyang on Ed: Like you mentioned, one of the main advantages of triangles is that they're always flat (and, by extension, tend to be a lot easier and quicker to work with, especially with GPUs). Using curved triangles is possible, but you end up losing out on many of the aforementioned advantages that triangles offer over quads, so you'll typically end up using many flat triangles to create the curvature effect.
Thanks, @rishiskhare and Mingyang! To add on, curved surfaces in 3D graphics are usually approximated with fine triangle meshes that have small triangles -- with all the triangles being planar.