Graphics Gems III (IBM Version)

V.2

PARTITIONING A 3-D CONVEX POLYGON WITH AN ARBITRARY PLANE

Norman Chin,     Columbia University, New York, New York

Publisher Summary

Partitioning 3-D polygons is required by various graphics algorithms as a preprocessing step—such as in the radiosity method and in the BSP tree visible-surface algorithm. The implementation of many applications is simplified by dealing with only convex polygons. This chapter describes how to partition planar convex polygons by an arbitrary plane in three-space. In a linked-list form, manipulating a few pointers is tedious to code but is usually faster than block copies. The inputs are the coefficients of the partitioning plane’s plane equation and the polygon to be partitioned in the linked-list format. ...