
Chapter
12
Surfaces
W
hen I wrote the first edition of this book, I predicted that the powerful pro-
cessors and the limited memory on the game consoles would steer developers
and artists toward using control-point surfaces. The premise was that only a small
number of control points need to be stored in memory, but the processor can tessel-
late rapidly to any reasonable level of subdivision. It appears that my prediction was
premature. Game artists appear to remain comfortable with polygonal models, and
each generation of console tends to have a lot more memory than the previous, so
the urgency is lacking to produce high-resolution tessellations from