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rlpo

Is this method of constructing complex shapes practical? Seems like it offers very little freedom depending on what 3d primitives are available

graphic_content

I think the number of shapes that we can represent through this is very limited.

nouyang

I wonder if the final shape is being saved as a tree of boolean operations in real software? Then it will take a huge amount of space and time to render.

keenan

@rlpo It's actually quite common for, e.g., designing mechanical parts. See the Wikipedia article on solid modeling.

keenan

@nouyang Actually, a tree like this will take way less than a typical polygon mesh. Even a super complex model might use only a few thousand primitives (spheres, cylinders, etc.), and a tree has size linear in the number of nodes. Compare with polygon meshes and point clouds, which regularly use millions of elements.