NOTE: This Technical Q&A has been retired. Please see the Technical Q&As page for current documentation.

Technical Q&A QD3D56
Default Number Of Surface Planes

Q: When rendering a QuickDraw 3D 1.5 file containing objects such as cylinders and ellipsoids, the default number of surface planes is much higher than in QD3D version 1.0.6. While this looks nice, it requires more memory. Is there a way in my application to limit the "resolution" (i.e., the number of surface planes) used by QD3D 1.5?

A: You can use a subdivision style to get control over the number of faces generated. For example, you can create a subdivision style object as follows:

theSubdivisionStyleData.method = kQ3SubdivisionMethodScreenSpace;
theSubdivisionStyleData.c1 = (float)20;
theSubdivisionStyleData.c2 = (float)20;
mSubdivisionStyle = Q3SubdivisionStyle_New(&theSubdivisionStyleData);

You can then submit the subdivision style in your rendering loop before you submit your geometry.

[Jul 11 1997]


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