The car model on the left was created using the Pro/ENGINEER system by Parametric Technology. This system, as most other industrial design systems, extensively uses spline curves and surfaces.

The image in the middle is the cover of the Computer Graphics World magazine, featuring "Geri's Game", an award-winning short from Pixar Studios. Geri, the main character of the short, was modeled using subdivision surfaces, a surface representation that we will discuss in the class.

The image on the right is the White Star spaceship from the Babylon 5 series. The 3D model of the ship was created and rendered using Lightwave 3D modeling and animation system by NewTek

The first picture at the bottom of the page is the "tank" from Quake II by Id Software It uses only few (probably several hundred polygons), carefully created by hand. In contrast, the "Happy Buddha" on the right, a model created at the Stanford Computer Graphics Lab using 3D scanning, contains 1.8 million polygons. Most of these polygons are not necessary for making images of the model, especially if the resolution is not very high. Mesh simplification algorithms that we will study in the class try to automate the process of reducing the number of polygons without sacrificing the visual quality. Ideally, such algorithms will allow one to obtain the left model from the right without human interference :-)