'Sharklet' is a material used in the hulls of ships that inhibits bacterial growth. It was inspired by shark's skin.
From their homepage:
> Sharklet is the world’s first technology to inhibit bacterial growth through pattern alone. The Sharklet surface is comprised of millions of microscopic features arranged in a distinct diamond pattern. The structure of the pattern alone inhibits bacteria from attaching, colonizing and forming biofilms. Sharklet contains no toxic additives or chemicals, and uses no antibiotics or antimicrobials.
In 3D characters animation, everything needs to be decomposed into "quads". Polygonal faces with more than 4 sides start behaving really weirdly under deformation -- there's more than one solution for how the resulting surface should be shaped -- whereas "quads" behave in a totally predictable fashion. I suspect that similar issues are at play here. You want the skin to be part of a deformable surface, and you want to minimize stresses during deformation. Hence: use quads.
Except in 3d animation you use almost exclusively triangles when actually rendering anything. A quad can be subdivided in two ways to form two triangles leading to unpredictable behaviour.
That said, during modelling you almost exclusively create quads since those lend themselves well to editing with edge loops. The render engine then converts those to (unambiguous) triangles.
That's true, but typically, quad-based models are not decomposed directly into triangles, but, rather, subdivision surfaces that do have a predictable resolution. In other words, a direct triangulation of a non-planar quad can be resolved in two contradictory ways -- but smoothing it out produces a hyperbolic paraboloid with just one consistent resolution.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 35.5 ms ] threadFrom their homepage:
> Sharklet is the world’s first technology to inhibit bacterial growth through pattern alone. The Sharklet surface is comprised of millions of microscopic features arranged in a distinct diamond pattern. The structure of the pattern alone inhibits bacteria from attaching, colonizing and forming biofilms. Sharklet contains no toxic additives or chemicals, and uses no antibiotics or antimicrobials.
That said, during modelling you almost exclusively create quads since those lend themselves well to editing with edge loops. The render engine then converts those to (unambiguous) triangles.
"The primary Sharklet micropattern is very small – about 3 microns tall and 2 microns wide."
How long it lasts would be part of the cost vs benefit equation.