A Primer on Bézier Curves – So What Makes a Bézier Curve?

mmostlyk 2 days ago 15 commentsRead Article on pomax.github.io

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Discussion (15 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jedimastert•about 3 hours ago

Related, I think Freya Holmér's "The Beauty of Bézier Curves" is in the running for one of the best educational videos on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/aVwxzDHniEw?si=K7QYf4luKhgv2mgd

SockThief•about 4 hours ago

"This site (obviously) works best with JS enabled But it's not required.

If you're reading this text block, then you have scripts disabled: thankfully, that's perfectly fine, and this site is not going to punish you for making smart choices around privacy and security in your browser. All the content will show just fine, you can still read the text, navigate to sections, and see the graphics that are used to illustrate the concepts that individual sections talk about."

That is how I'd like to the rest of the internet to work as well.

tsylba•about 4 hours ago

I'm under the impression, maybe wrongly so, that every other week we saw a primer on some basic CG stuff: Bézier curves, Fourier transforms, Dithering, Tonemapping, ..etc, of themes being fetched from a pool of maybe 10 items that cycle every once in a while but get upvoted because CG stuffs are inherently cool (and they're often well written like this one).

I think I'm gonna make `primersprimer.graphics` to list them or something.

kjs3•about 1 hour ago

The cynic would say primers on basic stuff are easy to create even if you're not really any sort of expert in the area, so people create a lot of them and lots of people who also aren't expert think that's great.

This, however, is pretty damn nifty, esp relative to most 'let me explain to you with prettier pictures what google (now chatgpt) just explained to me' fluff.

jedimastert•about 3 hours ago

I think it's just that the internet is particularly well suited for explanations on the intersection between mathematics and graphics

aagd•about 3 hours ago

Maybe your impression also has something to do with this being the 20th repost of the same link.

mcphage•about 2 hours ago

In its defense, this is also happens to be a really good link, and every time it gets posted, new people encounter it for the first time. (And I'm always happy to see it once more).

s1mon•about 2 hours ago

I've had this bookmarked for a while. Fantastic resource. It's been on HN dozens of times since 2017.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191577

matada_•about 4 hours ago

I used Bézier Curves to draw SVG curves for my weather dashboard EPD https://github.com/mt-empty/pi-inky-weather-epd

jnsie•about 3 hours ago

I haven't thought about Bézier Curves since my undergrad a long time ago. I distinctly remember wondering at the time why so many lecturers added extra hurdles (i.e. the need to understand the intricacies of Bézier Curves) in their assignments rather than letting students focus on the computer science/programming concepts they were meant to be learning.

hackerInnen•about 3 hours ago

Because if you have the time and opportunity to study something in depth, then it should be taken imo.

If I just want to get a working product I only need the basic algorithm, but understanding "all" of it is never wrong

hirako2000•about 3 hours ago

Same here. Bézout also was another mysterious killer.

Concepts coming from french mathematicians were made more obscure just to raise the bar. The irony is, in french Universities.

I recall a student who had enough failing the computer based assessments. He kindly asked the lead lecturer to show us all that he, at least, could land a perfect score. He made the mistake to try, got 8 points out of 20.

He admitted it wasn't easy when not prepared, and moved on with the next mined field.

arungopidas•2 days ago

have been a graphic designer for the last 15 years, never know how complex a simple bezier curve is. solid resource.

kjs3•about 1 hour ago

Often in mathematics (and by extension most science I guess), when something is named after someone, it usually means there's a huge amount going on behind the scenes if you start looking.

jansan•about 3 hours ago

A very simple explanation of Bézier curves is this:

- You have one polynomial describing the x-coordinate and one describing the y-coordinate, and both polynomials have the same degree (two for quadratic, three for cubic Bézier curves)

- The two polynomials share the same parameter t, which runs from 0 to 1.

That's all.