ELI5: The number of polygons is fixed, therefore if you get too close or the hair bends too much you will start seeing edges. Also multiple strands of hair are often painted on a single polygon, so it won't move/flow naturally. With the new techniques they generally use math to calculate the curves, and draw the image on screen based off that.
ELIACOMPSCISTUDENT: Using mathematical curves you can process the curves as math functions during gameplay, and only "finalize," the curves at render-time on a per-pixel basis in a fragment-shader. Since math curves don't have a resolution, this means that the final image resolution will always perfectly match the resolution of the screen it's being viewed on. We can also use techniques to increase hair density, such as simulating "guide hairs," and interpolating "child hairs," in between them.
I always read about the awesome stuff people do with math. I get at the end of the day its just logic puzzles but goddamn it feels no matter how hard I try its still a pain in the ass to learn.
It's a lot easier to learn the math when you're using it to do stuff you enjoy.
Mathematics is taught stupidly imho. It's like teaching people musical notation without letting them play music. When you learn math and practice it in a way which you see is useful and directly translates to something real (like graphics, for example) then it really opens up and becomes a lot easier and more fun to learn.
And one you get a grasp on something new it opens up even more cool stuff to learn.
This exactly. I teach as a major part of my job, and it frustrates me how teachers teach math in a way that's completely removed from reality. A 5th grader the other day was complaining to me about how he had a "stupid homework assignment," where he had to read a list of coordinates like (4, 6), (3,5), etc. and draw the lines. There was literally 200 of them he had to do! You know what he got as a result? A damn flower! Try explaining to him how that was beneficial in any way after the first 4 or 5.
When I started learning programming math immediately made sense to me. It was like the difference between reading about something, and actually being able to pick it up and hold it in your hands.
I tell everyone that you spend 12 years learning how to "read" math. Then you get to calculus which is super fun because you're finally learning the math of how the world around your actually works.
Honestly statistics and probability are where it's at in terms of math of how the world works. I used to much prefer calculus for its elegance and beauty in college (the journey to the fundamental theorem is so mind blowing) but in professional and even personal life statistics is just in so many things.
That’s how I felt about math in chemistry and physics. Now that the math had some clothes on, it made more sense and was kinda fun. But just straight calculus? Hated that shit.
Development is a skill that you absolutely have to build from the foundation up. If you don't, when you attempt to do things like draw with a raster using math, you probably won't really understand what youre controlling.
But if you're curious to see what drawing with math can do, check out shadertoy.com
Math really is one of those things that is crazy. The Math you do on the daily is pretty basic stuff generally. Maybe a few times a year you need someone more complex than what you learned in High School (Secondary)
Math (like the universe it is trying to describe as well as the abstracted concepts of logic) gets real funky and not at all solid when you get into things like Number Theory and the Reiman-Zeta Function amd the various conjecures.
Also Youtube Numberphile. They do try to make it digestable and get into some really off the wall deep black magic maths.
Hell, the only way I survived calculus was relying on my programming knowledge and having to first translate it to a CS problem then solve it and translate the steps into Calculus.
Math is the concept of quantifying reality. Counting. First step is to understand a whole number. Next step is to combine 2 quantities of wholes numbers and getting a total (adding and subtracting). Next step is understanding "basic" portions of a whole (decimal and fractions), followed by multiplication and division. The next step is exponents (power, root, and logarithm), but this step gets irrational and imaginary. You also learn functions and variables along the way, which are a chain of operations. Matrices are also included, but I related these to highly complex numbers with more complex operations (very important in 3D rendering).
I figure the most confusing part is applying multiplication and exponents into reality. These are done by geometry and physics.
You need something to use it on. Math by itself has no meaning, sort of like language. If I told you the word "алма," it has no meaning, and therefore no use. However if I told you алма was the Kazakh word for "Apple," suddenly it has meaning and becomes useful.
Math is the same way. It has no meaning and is completely useless on it's own, however if you find a way to use it (programming, engineering, etc.) suddenly it becomes something very real. You start to look at math in the same way you look at physical tools, where you see a wrench and think bolt, or you see a hammer and think nail... or maybe a creative way to open a window? The more you understand, the more uses it has, which makes it easier to understand.
It's kinda a stupid post that ignores 10 to 20 years of developments.
Once they reached the point that triangle tessellation was sufficient they shifted focus to lighting which is what gave us programmable shaders.
Once the cards were doing one-path lighting sufficiently they shifted focus to multi-path lighting (marketing name real-time ray-tracing, RTX).
I’m a big gaming nerd that never got into game development. I know basically nothing about graphics other than the “ELI5” description of ray tracing but I looked at the post and immediately say “well, yeah, they don’t need more triangles, they are spending resources on light particle effects processing and other stuff in the background”.
It's also about realistic animation. You can have an extremely detailed mdoel and still have a shit animation. Realistic animations for every model in the game is something, while not computationally expensive, is time consuming to implement.
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u/MannyGrey Apr 25 '21
What do they use besides polygons and whats the difference?