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Short answer? It depends, but “yes” is more generally going to be true than not. The smoother the edges the more polygons there are. The more polygons there ar

Short answer? It depends, but “yes” is more generally going to be true than not. The smoother the edges the more polygons there are. The more polygons there are the more work the processor has to do to render them. In a very basic sense. Now, it is absolutely possible to round the corners without incurring heavy processing cost but then you’re probably not going to get good collision, instead you’ll get incredibly obvious clipping (when one seemingly solid object passes through another without triggering collision). So game developers have to make a choice: look good in still photos or look good in gameplay? (Clipping is a jarring experience while playing). Bonus benefit: if you do it right the lower polygon count and less fancy graphic stuff means your game runs on a wider variety of hardware (smartphones, switch, Xbox/PlayStation, PC, specialty stuff). And that’s all not even getting into the cost of paying an artist to round those corners. Do you balloon your art payroll and have dozens of artists working on a few hundred “perfect” assets or would you rather they work on thousands of assets that are styled consistently and damn the real world verisimilitude? Games are a passion for many but capitalism invokes a cost when making them.

amelius 4y ago
Ok so instead of paying an artist to round those corners why not pay them to make round assets, then let the computer approximate them with polygons when and where appropriate?
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  > pay them to make round assets Those require NURBS, Non-uniform rational basis spline, and (almost) no one does NURBS assets, because it is most of the time it is a unnecessary pain to use and manipulate them directly.
  - zokier 4y ago
    NURBS is just one way of representing curved surfaces. Implict surfaces are another promising way of doing curves, and there are probably others too
- midnightclubbed 4y ago
  There have been attempts to go that route from both the hardware (eg Nvidia NV1, 1995) and software side (eg Quake 3 Area, 1999) and many attempts to render curved surfaces since. Generally triangles have remained dominant because they are easier to model, easier to manipulate and are rendered extremely optimally on hardware. The approximation to polygons when rendering is a non trivial task. Individual curved patches can be easily approximated to triangles but once you connect those patches together you have to ensure that the tessellated triangle edges match between neighboring patches. For the most part it is just easier and more performant to model with triangles and brute-force render them. One day curved surfaces may be a better choice but currently triangles are dominant.

amelius 4y ago

Ok so instead of paying an artist to round those corners why not pay them to make round assets, then let the computer approximate them with polygons when and where appropriate?

ElectricalUnion 4y ago
> pay them to make round assets Those require NURBS, Non-uniform rational basis spline, and (almost) no one does NURBS assets, because it is most of the time it is a unnecessary pain to use and manipulate them directly.
- zokier 4y ago
  NURBS is just one way of representing curved surfaces. Implict surfaces are another promising way of doing curves, and there are probably others too
midnightclubbed 4y ago
There have been attempts to go that route from both the hardware (eg Nvidia NV1, 1995) and software side (eg Quake 3 Area, 1999) and many attempts to render curved surfaces since. Generally triangles have remained dominant because they are easier to model, easier to manipulate and are rendered extremely optimally on hardware. The approximation to polygons when rendering is a non trivial task. Individual curved patches can be easily approximated to triangles but once you connect those patches together you have to ensure that the tessellated triangle edges match between neighboring patches. For the most part it is just easier and more performant to model with triangles and brute-force render them. One day curved surfaces may be a better choice but currently triangles are dominant.