What about NURBS and opengl 4.2 core?

Question

NURBS chapter in RedBook is denoted deprecated, including utility library: "Even though some of this functionality is part of the GLU library, it relies on functionality that has been removed from the core OpenGL library."

Does it mean OpenGL 4.2 actually lacks C++ toolkit for manipulating NURBS curves and surfaces? There are some commercial 3rd party toolkits, but they're not crossplatform ( windows, mainly )

...?

Answer 1

In OpenGL-3 and later you've got geometry, and vertex shaders at your disposal, OpenGL-4 even provides tesselation shaders. They offer everything to implement GPU accelerated NURBS and Bezier splines and surfaces. The evaluators of OpenGL-1.1 never were GPU accelerated on most hardware. So actually you're better off without them.

Just implement NURBS or Bezier evaluators in the shaders and send in vertices as surface sampling points.