Cutting Up Curved Things (With Math)
Summary
Cam Pedersen's Cutting Up Curved Things explains how GPUs render curved surfaces by tessellating them into triangles. It covers triangle meshes as two arrays (vertices and indices), how parametric surfaces like cylinders and spheres are sampled into grids, and common challenges such as poles and holes, including ear clipping as a robust triangulation method. The piece emphasizes that what we perceive as smooth curves is the result of dense, flat triangles and highlights practical steps from mathematics to GPU-ready geometry.