Why do you say that? I was in graduate school studying computer graphics when Q3A was released. Before that, at a different school as an undergrad, there were entire courses on Bézier splines and NURBS and multiple textbooks that had written about them. All the universities in the US with computer science departments that taught any graphics in the 80s & 90s covered Bézier curves, and that’s not to mention anyone studying design, drafting, CAD, architecture, engineering, etc.
Ah I looked it up. Bi-Quadratic Bézier patches were used in Quake 3. They were tessellated into triangles for the HW.
The first quote I found from Carmack about this: “Well, this is technology that's been done since the late '60s as far as the different geometric representations go.” So it wasn’t new in general, but was new to real-time game engines, and there is a pretty big group of gamers and aspiring game programmers who heard about Bézier patches for the first time with Q3A. https://www.reddit.com/r/quake/comments/16w5g1i/the_quake_3_...
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Why do you say that? I was in graduate school studying computer graphics when Q3A was released. Before that, at a different school as an undergrad, there were entire courses on Bézier splines and NURBS and multiple textbooks that had written about them. All the universities in the US with computer science departments that taught any graphics in the 80s & 90s covered Bézier curves, and that’s not to mention anyone studying design, drafting, CAD, architecture, engineering, etc.
Ah I looked it up. Bi-Quadratic Bézier patches were used in Quake 3. They were tessellated into triangles for the HW.
The first quote I found from Carmack about this: “Well, this is technology that's been done since the late '60s as far as the different geometric representations go.” So it wasn’t new in general, but was new to real-time game engines, and there is a pretty big group of gamers and aspiring game programmers who heard about Bézier patches for the first time with Q3A. https://www.reddit.com/r/quake/comments/16w5g1i/the_quake_3_...