
80 3. Supporting Shadows for Other Geometry Types
such as CAD or scientic applications/simulations. Also, direct rendering is most
ecient when using blobbies to represent particles (such as water), due to the large
data set complexity.
Another scenario that is becoming more common is the need to deal with dis-
tributed learning scenarios (distributed over the internet), where the 3D les need
to be quickly downloaded (via the internet) in order to visualize the content. With
certain higher-order surfaces (e.g., NURBS), the geometry representation can be
very compact and thus quite suitable for fast network transmission. As a result,
being able to