I don't think meshes are "created" in the same way... as in you don't have a bunch of data that goes through a pipeline which outputs the mesh. A mesh is essentially a list of points (the "vertex buffer"), which goes through the pipeline during rendering.
When I was taking graphics last year, most of the meshes that I dealt with were stored as text files (.obj), which were probably created using some 3D modeling program. The first assignment required us to procedurally generate a mesh by evaluating a heightmap function at multiple points though.
Now that I think about it, it would have been possible to evaluate the heightmap function in parallel on a GPU, though because of bandwidth issues discussed in an earlier lecture, I don't think the performance of the program would have increased substantially.
Are meshes also created this way?
@grarawr
I don't think meshes are "created" in the same way... as in you don't have a bunch of data that goes through a pipeline which outputs the mesh. A mesh is essentially a list of points (the "vertex buffer"), which goes through the pipeline during rendering.
When I was taking graphics last year, most of the meshes that I dealt with were stored as text files (.obj), which were probably created using some 3D modeling program. The first assignment required us to procedurally generate a mesh by evaluating a heightmap function at multiple points though.
Now that I think about it, it would have been possible to evaluate the heightmap function in parallel on a GPU, though because of bandwidth issues discussed in an earlier lecture, I don't think the performance of the program would have increased substantially.