GPUs are designed to do many things well, but drawing transparent 3D objects is not one of them. Opacity doesn't commute so that the order in which you draw surfaces makes a big difference. Of course simple additive blending does commute, but it's not really what we think of as "transparent objects". The simplest way to draw transparent objects is from back to front via the painter's algorithm. In this approach we sort geometry and draw only from back to front. This requires sorting triangles, which, in add
A minimal surface is the surface of minimal area between any given boundaries. In nature such shapes result from an equilibrium of homogeneous tension, e.g. in a soap film. Minimal surfaces have a constant mean curvature of zero, i.e. the sum of the principal curvatures at each point is zero. Particularly fascinating are minimal surfaces…