Rendering Patch Meshes

Simplifying meshes is a common practice, but what about the times when the meshes you've got are already too simple? You have enough triangle bandwidth to display even more vertices in your mesh. While it may not be common to want to increase the detail of a model, it is possible, and patch meshes are the way. Most modern 3D graphics modeling programs have a concept of a type of patch mesh, or some type of high order primitives such as NURBS or subdivided surfaces.

The objective of this book is not to explain the theory behind understanding patch meshes, so we will not get into that. What we want to do is to understand how to use them, and how they can increase a model's level of detail. To do this, we will create a small ...

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