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In Conclusion

I hope that this article gave you a good understanding of what bézier splines are and how you can use them in your games and demos. I also hope that I took out some of the mystery of what these things can do for you. Before I go, I would like to leave you with a few pro's and con's about Bézier splines and curved surfaces.

Pro's:

Curved surfaces can be an excellent add-on to an engine that uses LOD (Level Of Detail) techniques to reduce the amount of poly's rendered. It's easy to bump these surfaces down to only 4 polygons (for quadratics), and you can do this quite easily (by changing the detail bias). It's also easier to make smooth surfaces, and more organic looking environments with curved surfaces. Also, if you plan on adding support for a moving camera, Bézier splines are essential to making the camera path, and animation paths, smooth.

Con's:

The one major con that plagues most engines with curved surfaces in them, is that they take a long time to tesselate (turn into polygons), this doesn't really make that big of a difference if you tesselate them at load time, but if you have to do it frame per frame, you'll probably notice a huge performance hit. That's about the only major beef that most engine developers have with curved surfaces.

Anyhow, I hope that you've learned something new from this article that you didn't know when you started reading it. I also hope to see more uses of Bézier splines/surfaces in game engines, and demos! If you have any questions, suggestions, or comments about this article, or if you just want to talk about coding, feel free to e-mail(mr_oreo@hotmail.com) me, or ICQ(4718529). Thank you.

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-=|Mr.Oreo|=-
(Justin Reynen)

Note about the demos: Please read the "readme.txt" which can be found in the zip file associated with this article. Thank you.