CompuServe Messages

<<Patch modeling is of limited use, and not necessarily more powerful than current 3D vertice editing of polygons.>> I am aware of some of the limitations of patch modeling. I knew when I saw the demo of 3DS R4 (when the spline package was a part of it) that it was more of a toy implementation. A real implementation must be allow patches to be subdivided *locally* so that detail can be added only in the areas that it is needed without needlessly propogating the subdivision over the entire set of patches – and consequently it must solve the problem of cracks or discontinous surfaces. I know this is a difficult problem, I also know that there are solutions to it. Furthermore, I know this was not part of the 3DS implementation of splines. My hope was that once splines were at least implemented as a basic data type we could look forward to spline subdivision in a future release.