Just as Archimedes used a mosaic of infinitely many triangular shards to represent a segment of a smoothly curved parabola, modern-day animators at DreamWorks created Shrek’s round belly and his cute little trumpet-like ears out of tens of thousands of polygons. Even more were required for a tournament scene in which Shrek battled local thugs; each frame of that scene took over forty-five million polygons.
