Calculate Surface Area of a Bicubic Bezier Surface Patch

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Given the 16 3D control points as input for a bicubic Bézier surface patch, how would one go about calculating the surface area of such a patch?

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The easiest way would be to decompose it into triangles, and add up the areas of the triangles.

Alternatively, just call your favorite numerical quadrature function. Adding up triangles is just a very simple form of numerical quadrature, of course.

If you search, you'll find lots of info about calculating the arclength of a Bezier curve. Calculating the area of a Bezier patch is the 2D analog of this, and similar techniques are applicable.

There is no closed-form formula for the area.